ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY.
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Social Citizenship and Plural Values of Land: Land Acquisition cases from India
Fellow: Sattwick Dey Biswas Abstract: In the globalised economy, the value chains of production have crossed national boundaries. As a result, the demand has intensified for land acquisition in order to set up production facilities and infrastructure. This industrialisation proceeded rapidly, and, therefore, a vast area of land had to be acquired, both in the Global South and in the North. This development has led to many conflicts. These conflicts are the result of the inability to understand the plural values of land in the realisation of property rights in social citizenship. This article has considered two land expropriation case study areas in India, Salbani and Singur in West Bengal, as a source of empirical data. The empirical evidence suggests that the straitjacket of monorational property rights discourse, which heavily relies on the absolute ownership and control (via exclusion of others) ignores the different ways in which plural land values shape ideas of social citizenship. There is a need to rediscover the ‘social’ in citizenship to ensure the subordination of market price to the ideals of social justice. Keywords: social citizenship, social justice, plural values, market price and land acquisition. |
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Violence and warfare in prehistoric Japan
Fellow: Naoko Matsumoto Abstract: The origins and consequences of warfare or large-scale intergroup violence have been subject of long debate. Based on exhaustive surveys of skeletal remains for prehistoric hunter-gatherers and agriculturists in Japan, the present study examines levels of inferred violence and their implications for two evolutionary models, which ground warfare in parochial altruism versus subsistence. The former assumes that frequent warfare played an important role in the evolution of altruism, while the latter sees warfare as promoted by social changes induced by agriculture. Our results are inconsistent with the parochial altruism model but consistent with the subsistence model, although the mortality values attributable to violence between hunter-gatherers and agriculturists were comparable. Keywords: archaeology, warfare, parochial altruism, human skeletal remains, Japan |
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Changing relationship between the dead and the living in Japanese prehistory
Fellow: Naoko Matsumoto Abstract: The aim of this paper is to propose a new insight on the changing burial practice by regarding it as a part of the cognitive system for maintaining complex social relationships. Development of concentrated burials and their transformation in Japanese prehistory are examined to present a specific case of the changing relationship between the dead and the living to highlight the significance of the dead in sociocultural evolution. The essential feature of the burial practices observed at Jomon sites is the centrality of the dead and their continuous presence in the kinship system. The mortuary practices discussed in this paper represent a close relationship between the dead and the living in the non-hierarchical complex society, in which the dead were not detached from the society, but kept at its core, as a materialized reference of kin networks. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary thanatology: impacts of the dead on the living in humans and other animals’. Keywords: Jomon period, mortuary practice, kinship, ancestor worship, social cognition |
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Sociology Rediscovering Ethics
Fellow: Stephen Turner Abstract: Gorski tells us that the fact-value distinction is dead, that we know what human flourishing is and therefore relativism is wrong, and concludes that sociologists ought to throw off their self-imposed shackles and get into the business of telling other people how to live their lives, but only after sociologists listen to other people who are already in this business, especially from ethics and religion. In one sense this advice is misdirected, because, as I shall explain briefly below, sociologists have long been concerned with exactly the thing he suggests they should be concerned with, flourishing, eudaemonia or happiness, and continue to produce research on the topic in several subfields of the discipline. Morever, there have been many attempts to do exactly what he is recommending. The results, however, including my own attempt with Mark Wardell in the 1980s, have not been especially successful. In this comment I will try to point out some of the philosophical obstacles to this kind of work. The sociological obstacles are also serious: the intellectual cultures of ethics and sociology are so radically divergent that dialog is virtually impossible. Nevertheless, there is no reason to give up. In this respect I agree with Gorksi. My dissenting point will be a simple one: there is are multiple relations of fit between sociological ideas and ethical theories, not just the one he describes, and some ethical theory is in outright conflict with normal social science. |