Maitrayee Chaudhuri and Manish Thakur, "Doing Theory: Locations, Hierarchies and Disjunctions" (Orient Blackswan, 2018)

New Books in Sociology · Jun 11, 2023 · 45m

We live in times where theory is often understood as irrelevant in the real world. It appears to have no practical results. This has been further complicated in a post-fact world, where our ‘identities’ and ‘perception’ have become the final judges of truth. Sociology/social anthropology, in contrast, rests on a fundamental distinction between commonsense and theoretically informed knowledge. It teaches us to get rid of ‘perceptions’ and alerts us to go beyond taken-for-granted ideas. The paradox is that although theory is taught as a mandatory paper in sociology, it is either reduced to a…