Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Some questions before today's class
1. I
understand from Giddens that Weber in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism” reverses the causality and attribute the development of
capitalism not to the rationalization of economic life but to the irrational
religious ethic. While reading Marx in the last class we discussed how religion
serves as an instrument for the ruling classes to promote their ideology (or
how bourgeoisie use religion to serve their capitalist greed). But Weber seems
to argue that there was something in the religion/belief, in the first place,
to make capitalism as we know today possible in the Western Europe. Weber
establishes and fixes the causality in the religion/belief and not in the
rationalist action of the bourgeoisie who attempt to maximise profit by
exploiting what is at their hands. We also had discussed in the last class that
Weber as a scholar did not interact with Marx or his works. But what is
intriguing is that Weber seems to be critiquing the materialistic
interpretation of history, particularly, of capitalism. For both Marx and
Weber, the object of the study is capitalism. My question is ‘was Weber interacting
with or responding to Marx? Or is it that the materialistic philosophy had
gained currency and become popular by the time Weber wrote his book? If that is
the case, he could not help but respond and formulate his questions in dialogue
with materialistic philosophy.
2. Giddens
also informs us that Weber was trained in economic, legal and historical
thought. Given his training, what he couldn’t do was ‘generalize’ because History
as a knowledge domain is always preoccupied with the ‘particular’. When Weber thinks
of ‘Interpretative Sociology’ to offer general explanations of social actions and
develops the concept of ‘ideal type’ as a methodological tool, is he in some
way thinking of an epistemological gap that History cannot fill and thus the
need for Sociology to do this?
3. Is
Weber assuming that a researcher studying a social action will at all times be
able to construct a perfectly rational ideal type to offer a subjective
interpretation and causal explanation of a social action? In other words, will a
researcher be in full knowledge of all possibilities that an abstracted ideal
type can exhaust, such that s/he will be able to understand a real social
action juxtaposing it with the ‘constructed ideal type’? When does one build
these ideal types? Prior to empirical investigation or after it? What
difference does this (construction of ideal types prior to or after fieldwork) make
to the research?
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Tentative Reading List
SEMINAR IN SOCIAL
THEORY
NIAS, 2nd
term 2012-13
Carol Upadhya
Timings: Wednesdays,
11.30 - 1.30
Name of
instructor: Prof Carol Upadhya
Credits: 3
Description:
The course is
a reading seminar for committed students who want to work through some specific
readings in social theory for their PhD projects. The broad themes that will be
covered are:
1) Problem of structure and agency; practice
theory
2) Subjectivity, self, power
3) Class analysis
Tentative topics and
readings:
1.
Classical theory - Marx - historical materialism, value, commodity, exploitation,
class
relations Jan 16
Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and
Modern Society Theory (Cambridge UP, 1971), pp 1-64
Marx, from Collected Works (www.marxists.org):
Theses on Feuerbach (Vol 5, pp 6-8)
The German Ideology (Vol 5, pp 27-37;
59-62)
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: Prefaces to 1st and 2nd
editions; Sections 1-3, Commodity, Use-
Value, Exchange-Value; Section 4, Fetishism of
Commodities; Chap 7, Labour Process and Surplus Value; Chap 10, Sections 1-2,
Working Day; Chap 26, The Secret of Primitive Accumulation.
Marx, Capital, Vol. 3. Chapter 52,
Classes
2.
Classical theory - Weber - theory of social action; class and status;
domination,
authority Jan
23
Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and
Modern Society Theory (Cambridge UP, 1971),
pp
119-184, 224-242.
Max Weber, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Routledge 1992[1930]), Chaps 1-3, 5.
Weber, Economy and Society; An
Outline of Interpretive Sociology: Chap
1 (Social action),
pp 3-28; Chap
3 (Domination and legitimacy), pp 212-222; Chap 4 (Status groups and classes),
pp 302-307; Chap 9 (Class, status, party), pp 926-940; Chap 10 (Economic
domination), pp 941-955.
Susan J. Hekman, Weber’s ideal type: a contemporary
reassessment, Polity Vol. 16, No. 1: 119-137, 1983
3.
Habermas – theory of communicative action Jan
30
Jurgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative
Action: Vol I: Translator’s
Introduction, pp v-xlii; Chap
3, Social action, purposive activity, and communication; Vol II, Chap 5, part
1, pp 1-42; Chap 6, System and lifeworld, pp 113-197.
4.
Giddens – structuration theory; modernity and self Feb 20
Anthony Giddens, The
Constitution of Society (Polity, 1984), Introduction and Chaps 1, 4, 6.
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity; Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford
UP), Introduction, Chaps 1 & 3
5.
Bourdieu - practice theory March 13
Pierre Bourdieu,
The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard
Nice (Stanford University Press, 1990), pp 1-141.
Moishe Postone,
Edward LiPuma, and Craig Calhoun, Introduction: Bourdieu and social theory. In Calhoun et al (eds), Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1993), pp 1-13.
Craig Calhoun, Habitus, field, and
capital: the question of historical specificity. In Calhoun et al (eds),
Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp 61-88.
6.
Structure and agency – recent interventions March
20
Sherry B Ortner, Anthropology and
Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006), Introduction, Chaps 2, 5, 6.
Paul Kockelman, Agency: the relation
between meaning, power, and knowledge. Current Anthropology 48(3): 375-401,
2007.
Ivan
Karp, Agency and social theory: A review of Anthony Giddens. American
Ethnologist 13(1):131-137, 1986.
Edward
LiPuma, Culture and the concept of culture in a theory of practice. In Calhoun et al (eds), Bourdieu: Critical
Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp 14-34.
Brenda
Farnell, Getting out of the habitus: an alternative model of dynamically
embodied social action. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 6(1): 397-418, 2000.
7. Actor-network
theory - Latour March
28
Bruno Latour,. Reassembling the
Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), pp. --
Latour, Bruno. 1998. On actor-network theory: a
few clarifications.
8. Class
analysis – Bourdieu and beyond April 3
Pierre Bourdieu,
Language and Symbolic Power. Transl. G Raymond, M. Adamson (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), Introduction and Chapters 1, 7, 11.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1984) pp ---.
Pierre Bourdieu, The forms of capital, in J.G. Richardson (ed), Handbook of Theory and Research for the
Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp 241-58.
Edward LiPuma and Sarah Keene Meltzoff, Toward
a theory of culture and class: an Iberian example. American Ethnologist 16(2): 313-34, 1989.
9. Class
analysis – neo-Weberian, neo-Marxian approaches; class
outside the West April
10
Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), pp --.
Mark
Liechty, Suitably Modern; Making New
Middle Class Culture in a New Consumer Society (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003), Chaps 1&3.
Mazzarella, William. 2005. Middle class. In R. Dwyer (ed), South Asia Keywords.
Rachel
Heiman, Carla
Freeman, Mark
Liechty (eds), The
Global Middle Classes: Theorizing Through Ethnography (School for Advanced Research Press, 2012),
Introduction.
10. The
Foucaultian turn – power and subjectivity April
17
Michel Foucault, The subject
and power, Technologies of the self, Preface to The History of Sexuality,
Vol II;
[additional readings TBA]
[Critical readings TBA –
from Dreyfus and Rabinow, et al]
11.
Deleuze?? April 24
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