Cultural Studies II

                                                                            

This course takes up the issue of examining culture in the background of the postcolonial project. It examines the history of Orientalism, the discipline, and Orientalism, the book as also try to reconceptualise the postcolonial project of attending to cultural difference. The course introduces students to a novel way of thinking about culture and cultural difference by using the hypothesis of “culture as configuration of learning”.

Unit 5: Orientalism: The Project

1. William Jones and theory of linguistic monogenesis
2. German Romanticism and the search for the Ursprache
3. The Burke-Hastings debate and Cultural relativism
4. Suttee (Sati) and the search for authentic custom
5. Codification of Hindu Law

Unit 6: Orientalism: The Problem

1. Orientalism as a Discourse
2. Edward Said’s Orientalism and its impact
3. Colonial forms of knowledge
4. Anthropology and ‘the other’

Unit 7: Re-evaluating Orientalism

1. Disciplinary critiques of Orientalism
2. Orientalism as cognitive limit of the West

Unit 8: Towards a Philosophy of Culture

1. ‘Knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’
2. Anthropology as science of action

Detailed Bibliography

Arnold, Matthew. “Culture and Anarchy. 1869.” Ed. Samuel Lipman. New Haven: Yale UP (1994): 1–164. Print.

Asad, Talal. Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter. Ithaca Press London, 1973. Print.

Balagangadhara, S. N., and Jakob De Roover. “The Secular State and Religious Conflict: Liberal Neutrality and the Indian Case of Pluralism.” Journal of Political Philosophy 15.1 (2007): 67–92. Print.

Balagangadhara, S. N., and Marianne Keppens. “Reconceptualizing the Postcolonial Project: Beyond the Strictures and Structures of Orientalism.” interventions 11.1 (2009): 50–68. Print.

Bhabha, Homi. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences.” The post-colonial studies reader 209 (1995): n. pag. Print.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincialising Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and Colonial Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Print.

Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: The Derivative Discourse? Zed Books, 1986. Print.

Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton University Press, 1996. Print.

Dhareshwar, Vivek. “Valorizing the Present Orientalism, Postcoloniality and the Human Sciences.” Cultural Dynamics 10.2 (1998): 211–231. Print.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. Notes towards the Definition of Culture. Faber & Faber, 2010. Print.

Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. Columbia University Press, 2002. Print.

Forster, Michael N. German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond. Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.

Gandhi, Mahatma. Gandhi:’hind Swaraj’and Other Writings. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” Readings in the philosophy of social science (1994): 213–231. Print.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media, culture, and society: A critical reader (1986): 9–32. Print.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Treatise on the Origin of Language.” Herder: philosophical writings (2002): 65–166. Print.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Print.

Hoijer, Harry. “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.” Language in culture (1954): 92–105. Print.

Inden, Ronald. “Orientalist Constructions of India.” Modern Asian Studies 20.3 (1986): 401–446. Print.

Irwin, Robert. For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies. Penguin UK, 2007. Print.

Kay, Paul, and Willett Kempton. “What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?” American Anthropologist 86.1 (1984): 65–79. Print.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning. Psychology Press, 2001. Print.

---. Structural Anthropology. Basic Books, 2008. Print.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. Transaction Pub, 2013. Print.

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Polanyi, Michael. Science, Faith, and Society. University of Chicago Press, 1964. Print.

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Ramanujam, A. K. “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking.” The Book Review (1990): 19–23. Print.

Rao, Bairady Narahari. A Semiotic Reconstruction of Ryle’s Critique of Cartesianism. Vol. 38. Walter de Gruyter, 1994. Print.

Rao, Balagangadhara. “Comparative Anthropology and Action Sciences: An Essay on Knowing to Act and Acting to Know.” PHILOSOPHICA (GENT) 40.2 (1987): 77–107. Print.

Rao, Narahari. "Culture as Learnables: An Outline for a Research on the Inherited Traditions", Memo 30, Fachrichtung Philosophie, Lehrstuhl Prof. Dr. K. Lorenz, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbücken (1997)

Rao, Narahari. “A Meditation on the Christian Revelations An Asian Mode of’Self-Reflection’.” Cultural Dynamics 8.2 (1996): 189–209. Print.

Riley, Helene M. Kastinger. “Some German Theories on the Origin of Language from Herder to Wagner” The Modern Language Review (1979): 617–632. Print.

Ryle, Gilbert. “Knowing How and Knowing That: The Presidential Address.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Vol. 46. N. p., 1945. 1–16. Print.

---. The Concept of Mind. University of Chicago Press, 1949. Print.

Said, Edward. “Orientalism. 1978.” New York: Vintage 1994 (1979): n. pag. Print.

Schwab, Raymond. “The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880.” (1984): n. pag. Print.

Shils, Edward. Tradition. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Print.

Staal, Frits. “The Meaninglessness of Ritual.” Numen 26.1 (1979): 2–22. Print.

Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” New contexts of Canadian criticism (1997): 98–131. Print.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. Chatto & Windus London, 1958. Print.