The syllabus of the MA in sociology at Delhi University includes my article Cheli-Beti: Discourses of trafficking, and constructions gender, citizenship and nation in modern Nepal in its reading list.
Happy to be on the same page as Amartya Sen and Foucault!
Course SOC 218: Population and Society
This course takes students through the key concepts, approaches, and debates in the field of
population studies. By focusing on basic features of population structure and population
dynamics, it will enable students to understand the importance of demography in social life. A
key feature of the course is exposure to the critical sociological debates as well as policy related
debates is. At the end of the course, students will be conversant with the significance of
demography in social life and will have developed a critical orientation to public debates and
policies regarding population.
1. Introduction to population studies and classical approaches:
a) Relation with sociology and anthropology.
b) Population structures and population dynamics
c) Malthus and Marx
d) Durkheim and Halbwachs
2. Fertility:
a) Demographic transition theory
b) Approaches to Fertility
c) Reproductive technologies, sex selection and Infertility
3. Mortality:
a) Epidemiological transition Model
b) Approaches to mortality
4. Migration:
a) Migration as a demographic process
b) Approaches to migration
5. Population politics and policies:
a) Governmentality and biopower
b) Census and identity
c) Gender and religion
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The Course teacher may add a few extra ethnographic Studies to the reading list every year.
The final list of readings will be distributed by the course instructor in the first week of the
semester.
Readings:
1. Dudley F. Poston and Leone F. Bouvier 2010 Population and society: An introduction,
Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.
2. Susan Greenhalgh 1996 ‘The social construction of population science: An intellectual,
institutional and political history of the twentieth century demography’ in Comparative
studies in society and history, 38(1): 26-66.
3. D. I. Kertzer and Tom Fricke (eds.) 1997. Anthropological demography: Towards a new
synthesis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (Selected chapters).
4. Alaka Basu 2011 ‘Demographic dividend revisited: The mismatch between age and
economic activity-based dependency ratios’, Economic and political weekly, 46(39): 53-
58.
5. Thomas Malthus 1798 An Essay on the principle of population, Any Edition (Selected
Chapters).
6. Karl Marx 1973 (1857-1861) Grundrisse, London: Penguin, Section titled ‘The concept
of the free labourer contains the pauper. Population and overpopulation etc.’, pp 604-607,
available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/
grundrisse/ch12.htm#p604.
7. Karl Marx 1867 Capital, Volume 1, Moscow: progress Publishers, Chapter 25, footnote 6,
available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ ch25.htm.
8. Frederick Engels 1845 The condition of the working class in England (Chapter titled ‘The
attitude of the bourgeoisie towards the proletariat’) available at
https://www.marxists.org/archive/arx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch13.htm.
9. Mahmood Mamdani 1972 The myth of population control: Family, caste and class in an
Indian village, New York: Monthly Review Press.
10. Emile Durkheim 1984 Division of labour in society, London: Macmillan. (Part II, chapter
2 ‘The causes’).
11. Emile Durkheim, H. L. Sutcliffe, John Simons 1992 “Suicide and Fertility: A Study of
Moral Statistics” European Journal of Population / Revue Européenne de Démographie,
8(3): 175-197.
12. Maurice Halbwachs 1960 Population and society: Introduction to social morphology,
Glencoe: Free Press.
13. Jennifer Johnson-Hanks 2008 ‘Demographic transitions and modernity’ Annual review of
anthropology, 37:301–15.
14. Susan Greenhalgh ed. 1995 Situating fertility: Anthropology and demographic inquiry,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Selected chapters).
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15. Tulsi Patel 2006 (1994) Fertility behaviour: Population and society in a Rajasthan
village, Delhi: Oxford University Press (Selected Chapters).
16. Tim Dyson and Mick Moore 1983 ‘On kinship structure, female autonomy, and
demographic behavior in India’, Population and development review, 9(1): 35-60.
17. Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen 2002 Infertility around the globe: New thinking on
childlessness, gender and reproductive technologies (Selected chapters).
18. Tulsi Patel ed. 2007. Sex selective abortion in India. New Delhi: Sage. (Selected
chapters).
19. Nancy Scheper-Hughes (ed.) 1987 Child survival: Anthropological perspectives on the
treatment and maltreatment of children. (Selected chapters).
20. Paul Farmer 2004 ‘An anthropology of structural violence’ Current Anthropology, 45(3):
305-325.
21. Amartya Sen 1993 ‘The economics of life and death’ Scientific American, May, 40-47.
22. Amartya Sen 1990 ‘More than 100 million women are missing’, The New York review of
books. December.
23. Lee, Everett S. 1966 ‘A Theory of Migration’ Demography, 3(1):47-57.
24. Hania Zlotnik 2006 ‘Theories of International Migration’ in Graziella Caselli, Jacques
Vallin, and Guillaume Wunsch (ed.) Demography: Analysis and synthesis, Volume II,
London: Academic Press, pp. 293-306.
25. Caroline B. Brettell. 2000. ‘Theorizing migration in anthropology: The social
construction of networks, identities, communities, and globalscapes.” In Caroline B.
Brettell & James F. Hollifield (eds.) Migration theory: Talking across disciplines, New
York and London: Routledge, pp. 97-135.
26. Caroline Brettell 2003 Anthropology and Migration: Essays on Transnationalism,
Ethnicity and identity, Walnut Creek CA, Altamira Press, (Chapter 2: Migration stories).
27. Sushma Joshi 2001 ‘Cheli-Beti': Discourses of trafficking and constructions of gender,
citizenship and Nation in modern Nepal’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,
24(1): 157 – 175.
28. Michel Foucault Security, territory, population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-
8, Palgrave: Macmillan (Selected Parts).
29. Ian Hacking 1991 ‘How Should We Do the History of Statistics?’ in G. Burchell et al
(eds.) The Foucault Effect, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Ch. 9.
30. Mark Maguire 2009 ‘The Birth of Biometric Security’ Anthropology Today. 25(2): 9-14.
31. Sarah Hodges 2004 ‘Governmentality, population and reproductive family in modern
India’, Economic and political weekly, 39(11): 1157-1163.
32. Emma Tarlo 1995 ‘From victim to agent: Memories of emergency from a resettlement
colony in Delhi’ Economic and political weekly, 30(46): 2921-28.
33. David I Kertzer and Dominique Arel 2001 Census and identity: The politics of race,
ethnicity and language in national censuses, Cambridge University Press, chapters 1, 2,
3, 7.
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34. Sumit Guha 2013 Beyond caste: Identity and power in south Asia, past and present,
Leiden: Brill, Chapter 5, (Ruling, identifying and counting: Knowledge and power in
eighteenth century India.
35. Nilanjana Chatterjee and Nancy Riley 2001 ‘Planning an Indian modernity: The gendered
politics of family planning’ Signs, 26(3): 811-45.
36. Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery 2006 Confronting Saffron Demography: Religion
fertility and women’s status in India, New Delhi: Three Essays Collective. (Essay 1).
You can find the syallabus here: http://www.du.ac.in/du/uploads/Feedback/MA_Sociology.pdf
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