Sociology and Anthropology of Education in India

It is noteworthy that sociology and (social) anthropology has been interchangeably used in India. Various reasons have been attributed to this erasure of distinction between the two social science disciplines in the Indian context. The service rendered by the discipline of anthropology to colonialism has had implications for the discipline in post-colonial India. Scholars who started to undertake the systematic study of Indian society felt compelled to simultaneously, distance themselves from the colonial heritage associated with anthropology, while also establishing that systematic social enquiry which had been put in the service of colonial administration was “legitimate and scientific and in tune with the aspirations of the newly independent nation” (Nambissan and Rao, 2013, p. 9).  Furthermore, anthropology is regarded as the study of “other cultures”. This meant that anthropologists in India would have to travel to another part of the world to be regarded as “anthropologists”. Due to paucity of funds such interest was difficult to sustain for scholars based in India. Thus eminent Indian sociologist the late Satish Saberwal (1983) writes, “Accredited as anthropologists abroad, the scholars sought recognition as sociologists in India…Working on society in India, we tended then to move over to the banner marked ‘sociology’ ” (p. 304; see also Srinivas, 1997). However, with an increasing number of anthropologists studying their own culture, the distinction between sociology and anthropology (especially social anthropology), and their sub-fields Anthropology of Education and Sociology of Education are getting increasingly blurred and used interchangeably in the Indian context. 

Sociology and Education as disciplines have had historical differences with sociology being considered a theoretical domain while education was empirical (Chanana, 2013). For instance, Education as a discipline was relegated to teacher education institutes which were outside the purview of Indian university and higher educational spaces where sociological research took place (Chanana, 2013). Initially, studies of education undertaken by sociologists focussed on social and economic basis for educational access. Under the influence of New Sociology of Education in the 1970s, however, the focus shifted to researching classroom transactions and understanding the everyday processes in schools (Nambissan, 2013). Nambissan (2013) comments on the need to further open up the ‘black box of schooling’ using the theoretical perspective offered by SoE so that the experience of education and learning in schools can be investigated through the lens of structures of discrimination and inequality that is inherent in Indian society. 

Ethnographically researched studies go against the grain of what has for long been the dominant trend within educational research in India—quantitative, survey questionnaire based studies. This could be because education, with its applied and normative functions, has been of immediate concern to policy makers and administrators. Hence sociologist Suma Chitnis observed that “there was no room to advance into a deeper understanding of the issue researched…” (in Nambissan and Rao, 2013, p. 12). Moreover, education as a discipline in India has primarily been ensconced in teacher education institutions which have been dominated by psychologists. In such a context, the intervention of an anthropological perspective on/in education has contributed to a “sociocultural contextualization of the educative process and its analysis” (Spindler, 2000, as cited in Bloome, Beauchemin, Brady, Buescher, Kim, & Schey, 2018, p. 1). In doing so, it shifts our attention “…from the individual as the locus of education to the social and cultural processes and practices, from autonomously constituted to contextually and ideologically constituted, and from discrete skills to repertoires of practice” (ibid, p. 4).

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References

Bloome, D., Beauchemin, F., Brady, J., Buescher, E., Kim, M. Y., & Schey, R. (2018). Anthropology of education, anthropology in education, and anthropology for education. The international encyclopedia of anthropology, 1-10.

Chanana, K. (2013). Sociology of Education and Sociology in India: Disciplinary Boundaries and Institutional Spaces. In: G.B. Nambissan & S.S. Rao (Eds.). Sociology of education in India: Changing contours and emerging concerns. Oxford University Press.

Nambissan, G.B. (2013). Opening up the black box? Sociologists and the study of schooling in India. In: G.B. Nambissan & S.S. Rao (Eds.). Sociology of education in India: Changing contours and emerging concerns. Oxford University Press.

Nambissan, G. B., & Rao, S. S. (Eds.). (2013). Sociology of education in India: Changing contours and emerging concerns. Oxford University Press.

Saberwal, S. (1983). For a sociology of India: Uncertain transplants: Anthropology and sociology in India. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 17(2), 301-315.

Srinivas, M. N. (1997). Practicing social anthropology in India. Annual Review of Anthropology, 26, 0-16.