1. Indian Anthrop. Soc. 59 (2): 167-171(2024) Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society (ISSN 0019-4387) ©The Indian Anthropological Society 

Suman Nath. Democracy and Social Cleavage in India: Ethnography of riots,  

everyday politics and communalism in West Bengal c. 2012-2021. New York:  

Routledge (2022). ISBN 978-1-032-42573-3 (hard bound). Pages  

xv+149. Price: Hard Bound ₹1295 (South Asia edition)

The book under review deals with an intriguing phase of Bengal politics – a phase which has  been characterized by an unprecedented rise of identity politics as a way of life in West Bengal.  Prior to and during the Partition of India the issue of identity had played a decisive role in the  political life of the country and also that of undivided Bengal. Yet, with the establishment of the  Left Front rule much of it was relegated to the background, with particular focus being placed  on mobilization of the masses primarily on development-related issues like land, food security,  employment and the like. The electoral battle was fought along ideological lines with these issues  taking the centre stage. However, much of this has changed during the past decade and the fight  for the ballot box has begun to pivot on divisive agendas and communal narratives thereby  giving rise to the so-called ‘polarisation’ debate in the politics of the state.  

Such tendencies being dangerous portents for the state’s socio-political fabric, it seems  quite necessary, rather urgent, to look into the dynamics of such change. The book Democracy and  Social Cleavage in India by Suman Nath has, quite systematically, looked into the issue by  addressing two fundamental questions: firstly, what is it that has caused the issue of identity  politics to predominate political discourses of the state for the past decade or so and secondly,  what are the mechanisms that have helped in sustaining and strengthening the politics-identity  interface. In doing so the author has not only unraveled the way in which the inclusive liberal  space is being encroached upon by exclusive primordial constructs but has also challenged the  idea of ‘party-society’ as propounded by scholars like Dwaipayan Bhattacharya. On the basis of his field-based study conducted during the last decade of the left rule, Bhattacharya (2009)  concluded that party became the most visible form of social structure that superseded all other  ‘competing channels of public transaction…political parties in rural West Bengal largely  transcended caste, religion, ethnicity-based organizations,’ thereby giving rise to a particular  form of sociability called ‘party-society.’ In other words, the perpetuation of the so-called party  society during the Left Front era strengthened the party organization, made party the moral  custodian of public life and pushed all other forms of primordial identity-based organizations  to the backburner. However, as the author argues, with the onset of the Trinamool Congress  (TMC) regime the grip of the party over public life has loosened to a great extent and ‘Bengal is  now well within post-party regime’ (p. 109). This does not, necessarily, mean that the idea of 

‘party society’ itself has become an obsolete one, rather its operational dynamics have  undergone vast changes. Today various primordial identity-based organizations have cropped  up which have successfully supplanted the strong party machinery in defining and determining  the political landscape of contemporary Bengal. The author has sought to judge recent political  events, in terms of increasing number of riots and incidents of communalism, in the light of 

this transformed reality. He has attempted to explain the recent turn of events in West Bengal  politics by using the concept of ‘cultural misrecognition’ and the way it has fomented communal  violence time and again during the past decade or so.  

Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of ‘misrecognition’ the author states that though the  phenomenon has existed even during the Left Front rule, the TMC rule has brought in a  variation in its nature. The Left Front Government (LFG) perpetuated, according to the author,  a kind of ‘systemic misrecognition’ whereby the entire political system was under the rigid  control of the party and where people found the party to be an extension of the government  that was easily accessible. On the contrary, the TMC deliberately attempted to ‘free the public  sphere from the party grid’ (p. 109) and ‘reinvented various traditional cultural forms’ (p.17) in  order to legitimize the various policy decisions taken by it from time to time, a phenomenon he  conceptualizes as ‘cultural misrecognition.’ It was through such a mechanism that primordial  identity issues gradually came to occupy a significant place in the mainstream politics of Bengal.  West Bengal being a state where identity consolidation was mostly on a very minor scale, the  sudden upsurge of the same in the recent past quite naturally demands an intensive engagement  with the issue.  

On the basis of longitudinal and multi-site ethnographic study, the author has made a  brilliant attempt to decode the various mechanisms through which religious polarization is being  manufactured in the state. The book has been structured into eight chapters including an  introduction and a conclusion which focusses on the ways in which misrecognition-based  politics has been steering West Bengal towards the path of communal violence, the  organizational bases perpetuating such divisiveness and its subsequent manifestations and how  the state is slowly turning into a breeding ground for competitive communalism in the light of 

the policies pursued by the TMC as well as the BJP which, quite recently, has made significant  inroads into Bengal politics. 

Contemporary politics is witnessing a great deal of interaction and interrelation  between power and culture thereby giving rise to a complex patchwork of power-culture  interface. It is this ‘power-culture’ interface that best addresses the issue of identity polarization.  But how? In order to address this question, the author begins with an understanding of the  construction of bhadralok culture during the LF rule in Bengal. This bhadralok culture mainly  

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revolved round the elites in the cities and upper- and middle-class peasantry in the villages. The  peripheral sections of the populace, or more precisely the ‘subalterns’, continued to thrive on the  fringes of the society with their culture, their practices and their traditions receiving little or no  attention. It was this cultural exclusion that was systematically taken advantage of by the TMC  for consolidating its support base when it came to power. In other words, TMC used the ‘power  of culture’ as a political weapon in its favour.  

The author makes the point that the TMC regime has capitalized on various, hitherto,  neglected cultural mechanisms to divert people’s attention away from the effective delivery of public goods and services. His fieldwork data shows how, unlike the LFG, conflict resolution  and the process of decision-making at the village level during the TMC regime was facilitated by  invoking traditional structures like sholoana and traditional tribal community leaders namely the  majhis and how these instruments were used for legitimizing the party’s decisions. Again, a jump  in the number of government-sponsored fairs and festivals, the introduction of various populist  policies like providing monetary benefits to the Imams and Muezzins and the frequent use of religious symbols to mobilize religious identities are all illustrative of the kind of identity politics  that TMC uses and how it is impregnated with the possibility of segmenting the population of the state. In addition, instances of the government’s policy of favouring one community over  the other in the event of overlapping of dates of processions and festivals also seemed to be a bit  murky resulting not only in a sense of disquiet among a section of the Hindus but also  facilitating, to a large extent, the rise of Hindutva forces and the consequent construction of the  idea of Hindu victimhood. All these developments, over the years, have made communal issues  to gradually seep into the political consciousness of the people of Bengal. The greatest  manifestation of this is the number of riots that Bengal has been witnessing since 2016. 

While documenting the communal clashes that broke out in various parts of West  Bengal, the author seeks to draw attention to the factors that conduce towards identity  consolidation and the ways in which a trivial incident can flare up a large-scale violence. A unique  feature of the author’s ethnographic inquiry constitutes his focus on the politics-religious  interface at the micro-level and the way it is cultivating religious schism in West Bengal. In doing  so, he has not only emphasized the process of inter-community identity consolidation but also  the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. He, in fact, dedicates an entire chapter to the issue of the rise  of Islamic fundamentalism in Bengal. He argues that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is  concurrent with that of Hindutva organizations. Using his ethnographic study at Rejinagar, the  author examines the percolation of fundamentalist ideas among the Muslims of Bengal and also  exposes its stereotyping of ideal Muslims. Such an attempt of civilizing along identity lines have  been further strengthened with the mushrooming of various Islamic organizations which have  

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made their presence felt quite decisively in the political landscape of the state. Further, situating  the phenomenon in the context of growing Islamic insurgency and crackdown of jihadi  organizations in neighboring Bangladesh, the author shows the symbiotic relationship between  cross-border operation of the sectarian organizations and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism  in Bengal.  

That the state has been transformed into a potential tinderbox becomes evident from  the book’s ethnographic vignettes of the riots. The author’s narratives and the consequent  analysis of the riots seems to highlight the following factors that fuel communal passions in  various contexts: 

1. a) promotion of certain ‘invented traditions’ and festivals aided with fierce slogans and brazen  display of violence becoming strategic fulcrums of polarization. Examples of this include  Hanuman Jayanti, aggressive rallies organized on the occasion of festivals like Ram Navami and  the like where even figures like Ram and Hanuman are losing their divinity to religious and  political contestations. 
2. b) spread of fake and inflammatory news via social media that easily taps into the identity  sentiments of the people. 
3. c) inaction and even complicity on part of the state administration as a possible mechanism for  avoiding culpability. 
4. d) systematic engineering of the attacks by the powerful local groups working hand in glove with  outsiders. 

The author in his narratives has also provided certain compelling evidence to show how  divisions are being forged between various religious communities on the basis of their attires,  food habits and their lifestyles thereby, further, facilitating the process of, what may be termed  as, ‘identity recognition.’ This, however, has been placed in a much larger context of what the  entire country is grappling with since 2014 which inaugurated the rule of the saffron party under  the stewardship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. With its overarching theme mostly centering  round the idea of ‘Hindu nationalism’, the party has sought to shape the entire political  landscape in terms of the same. The party is relentlessly seeking to create a space for ‘populism,  (Hindu) nationalism, authoritarianism and majoritarianism’ (p.110) to thrive. BJP’s majoritarian  sentiments, in the author’s own words, is based on ‘two major pillars: first, constant  demonization of the “others”-primarily the Muslims and Dalits and second, popularization of invented traditions and materializing the long-drawn dream of Hindutva.” (p.112) which the  author labels as tools of ‘cultural misrecognitions.’ This process of reinforcement of cultural  identity and its concomitant usage for political/electoral dividends is in tandem with what the  

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TMC is doing in Bengal. In fact, the identity-based mobilization as initiated by the TMC, in  contrast to the class-based mobilization of the left regime, has further made the ground fertile  for the BJP, which for quite long had occupied a back seat,to emerge as substantial political force  in the state (Vincent, 2022). This claim has been substantiated by the author himself by using  data from the Election Commission of India to show the progressive rise in the vote share of the  BJP in the state’s elections since 2016. However, the vote bank politics not only pivots around  communal sentiments but also regional sentiments as portrayed by the Bengali/non-Bengali or  the insider/outsider debate as evident from the catchy slogans like ‘bangla nijer meye kei chay’  (Bengal wants its own daughter) and ‘bohirago toder dao biday’ (bid farewell to the outsiders).  However, as the author notes, in the run-up to the assembly elections of 2021, the TMC  embarked upon a journey of course correction whereby it started re-engaging with the more  inclusive public-service delivery-based model to satisfy the wishes of the electorate. According  to political analysts, the aggressive promotion of programmes like Duare Sarkar, Swasthya Sathi  have, indeed, helped the party in holding ground in the 2021 elections. However, as the author  cautions, how far such catapulting of welfare programmes into the political rhetoric of the state  can actually divert people’s attention away from identity fault lines that have been carefully  cultivated, remains quite doubtful. Hence the author ends with an ominous note that ‘identity  issues is not going to go backstage anytime soon.’ 

The author’s style of presentation is very lucid and his explanation of facts with  analytical rigor is quite commendable. The book definitely has a potential to add a new  dimension to the existing literature on Bengal politics by viewing current state policies through  the lens of ‘cultural misrecognition.’ This book is a fantastic read for those who would like to  ruminate the trajectory of identity politics in Bengal and its consequential impact on the political  discourse of the state over the past few years. 

REFERENCES 

Bhattacharyya, Dwaipayan 2009. Of control and factions: The changing ‘party-society’ in rural West Bengal. Economic  and Political Weekly 44(9): 59-69. 

Vincent, Maxime 2022. Hindus in India, Bengalis in Bengal: the role of religious and regional identities in West Bengal  politics. Contemporary South Asia 30(4): 534-550. 

Sootrisa Basak, Department of Political Science 

Durgapur Government College,  

Paschim Bardhaman-71321 

Email id: sootri.b@gmail.com

Why Anthropology is important?
Anthropology is an important subject not only for the Europeans and Americans but also for the Indians and particularly for the ordinary citizens. Why this is so? Because, the subject is no less important than History and Geography and it should be taught from the high school level. Hence, there is an urgent need for making Anthropology visible in all spheres of public life. Apart from technical pieces, anthropologists have engaged themselves in popular writings on public issues in the form of books, newspaper articles, blogs, and social media posts, and they are reaching the public domain outside the academia. This is because of the fact that anthropology is a unique subject, which looks at human beings from a biocultural perspective. Unlike other social science subjects, for example, History, Economics,
Geography and Political Science, Anthropology uses a special method to look at human societies and cultures, which anthropologists call fieldwork with participant observation. Put very simply, being humans, anthropologists are observers of human beings in groups but not under controlled situations as in the Physical and Biological Sciences.. The popular maxim, sometime used in anthropology textbooks: ‘Field is the laboratory of anthropology’ is not true. There is no laboratory for the anthropologists, only behaviour of human beings as it occurs in societies. A subject like anthropology, which I have described above, has immense public importance in India, which is full of biological and societal diversities interacting in both cooperative and conflicting manner throughout the centuries.

Public Anthropology in the West
During the last two decades a group of anthropologists in USA and Great Britain have been trying to develop a kind of anthropology, which they designated as ‘Public Anthropology’, although the necessity of the attention to public issues by the anthropologists were drawn much earlier (Huizer, 1979; Peacock, 1997) along with the issue of the public image of anthropology (Shore, 1996).
For public anthropology objectivity lies less in the pronouncements of authorities than in conversations among concerned parties. “Truth” does not reside in the exhortations of experts nor in the palaces of power. It develops gradually in the arguments and counterarguments of people. One pronouncement by one expert does not suffice. What is required are challenges and counter-challenges. The broader and more comprehensive the challenges, the broader and more comprehensive the authority of the claims (Borofsky: 2000b:10). In his articles and a book published during 2000-2019, Robert Borofsky, an American anthropologist has been pushing the agenda and justifications for public anthropology (Borofsky, 2000a&b; Borofsky, 2002; Borofsky& Lauri, 2019; Borofsky, 2019). He developed a Center for Public Anthropology and was among the founders of a journal named Public Anthropology (Vine, 2011) and developed a course on Public Anthropology) in 2 USA. In his article ‘Public Anthropology. Where to? What next?’ published in the May 2000 issue of the Anthropology News, Borofsky informed that with Renato Rosaldo he coined the term and ‘the phrase is taking on a life of its own’. But what does this phrase mean? In Borofsky’s words:
How does public anthropology will address the ‘broad critical concerns’ beyond the discipline? According to Borofsky:
Public anthropology engages issues and audiences beyond today’s self-imposed disciplinary boundaries. The focus is on conversations with broad audiences about broad concerns. Although some anthropologists already engage today’s big questions regarding rights, health, violence, governance and justice, many refine narrow (and narrower) problems that concern few (and fewer) people outside the discipline. Public anthropology seeks to address broad critical concerns in ways that others beyond the discipline are able to understand what anthropologists can offer to the reframing and easing–if not necessarily always resolving of present-day dilemmas (Borofsky: 2000b:9).
In Great Britain public anthropology also became an issue, and we find in the pages of Anthropology Today, a 2009 Guest Editorial entitled ‘Making anthropology public’ by Nancy Schepher-Hughes in which she asked at the end of her article:
If anthropology cannot be put to service as a tool for human liberation why are we bothering with it at all? A public anthropology can play its part in all these developments: it has an opportunity to become an arbiter of emancipatory change not just within the discipline, but for humanity itself (Schepher-Huges: 2009:3).
The label ‘Public Anthropology’ as coined by Borofsky and his supporters got challenged in the pages of Anthropology News. In its September 2000 issue, Merrill Singer wrote a commentary entitled ‘Why I am not a public anthropologist’. In the article, Singer refused to accept Borofsky’s ‘Public Anthropology’ different from ‘Applied Anthropology’ particularly when anthropologists make important contributions in ‘many areas of contemporary public concern’ which included environmental issues, nutrition, education, ethics, land reform, and community development. In his words:
For thousands’ of applied anthropologists the Borofsky thesis is invalid. Indeed from A for “aging” to Z for “zoos”, applied anthropologists are heavily engaged in public work and often comment on pressing issues… However, given that many applied anthropologists already do the kinds of things that are now being described as PA, it is hard to understand why a new label is needed, except as a device for distancing public anthropologists from applied anthropology (Singer:2000:6).
In another perceptive review article published in Anthropology Today, Hugh Gusterson depicted how anthropologists through the print media in USA are still being projected as scientists dealing with strange customs in home and abroad. According to Gusterson, the significant researches of anthropologists on the destructive impact of a liberalized economy on local ecosystems and culture have been largely ignored in the popular media, which inevitably doomed the prospective career of a real public anthropology. I quote
The problem here is not just that most academic anthropologists are not very good at communicating with the public, but that anthropologists are constructed in the public sphere as having little to say about some of the most urgent and pressing political and th economic controversies of the day. Through the 20 century a division of labour arose and ossified in the social sciences, and we are now imprisoned by its lingering force.
According to this division of labour, economists have jurisdiction over economics, and political scientists have jurisdiction over politics and war. Anthropologists insisted from the beginning of the 20th century that they produced holistic descriptions of entire societies, including their economic and political systems, but we were only given a permit to do this as long as we confined ourselves to those marginal societies of little interest to academic economists and political scientists (Gusterson:2013: 13).
Amid all these new pronouncements on public anthropology and the controversies around it, one of the most interesting things about this discourse in USA and Great Britain is the absence of Indian public anthropology (Bangstad, 2017). Just after I finished this editorial Robert Borofsky sent me a recent book by email entitled Revitalizing Anthropology:Let’s Focus the Field on Benefitting Others edited by him and published in 2023. The book has come out from Borofsky’s Center for a Public Anthropology located at Kailua, Hawaii and has a Spanish edition. The book contained a long blurb section wherein short texts by three Indian anthropologists(Subhadra Mitra Channa, Abhijit Guha and Subho Roy) have been included. This, shows that the Indian anthropologists, for the first time are in the list of anthropologists who could comment on public anthropology at the global level. The book has full chapters and abstracts written by graduate students from Australia, Canada, China, Guatemala, Japan, the United States, and Zimbabwe. There is however, no text from the graduate students from India. India still remains absent in the main text of the book! Sad enough!
Public Anthropology in India

The pioneering studies done by Tarak Chandra Das on Bengal famine (Das,1943), social tensions among the refugees in Bengal by B.S.Guha (Guha, 1959), resettlement of refugees in Andaman Islands by Surajit Sinha(Sinha, 1955), displacement of people by industries and big dams by B.K.Roy Burman (Roy Burman,1961) and Irawati Karve and Jai Nimbkar(Karve and Nimbkar,1969) and also the later pioneering policy focused bio-social researches of Pranab Ganguly (Ganguly, 1975: 7-27) and Amitabha Basu(Basu1974: 17-23) at the Anthropological Survey of India and the Indian Statistical Institute did not find any place in the writings of the public anthropologists of the western countries(see for example, Beck, 2009; Besteman, 2013;Fassin, 2018; Tauber and Zinn, 2015). In his aforementioned
2019 book, Borofsky briefly described the methodology of the Nobel Laureate economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo on their randomized trials in Indian villages about the distribution of mosquito nets among the poor Indian villagers (Borofsky, 2019b).There was no further discussion or description on the enormous researches done by the Indian anthropologists on development, displacement, disease, health and nutrition among the poor and marginalized people in the book written by Borofsky. In this connection it may be worthwhile to mention the publication of a special issue of Indian Anthropologist entitled ‘Anthropology’s contributions to public policy’ in 2014 wherein the authors demonstrated how the different tools developed by anthropologists became useful to understand the social and political processes of policymaking in India(Pellisary, 2014).We also do not find any discussion by the western proponents of public anthropology on this valuable contribution of Indian anthropologists. In sum, Western public anthropology still largely remained oblivious about the public anthropology in India.
Public anthropology in India has a long tradition since the independence of the country and unlike western countries public anthropology is inseparably connected with nation-building. The Indian anthropologists did make attempts to study the major problems (viz. famine, rehabilitation of refugees and development caused displacement) encountered by the country in the early periods of nation building as exemplified in the works of B.S.Guha, T.C.Das, N.K.Bose, Irawati Karve, Surajit Sinha, and their successors. Under the changing times and circumstances, the future of public anthropology in India lie in carrying forward this remarkable tradition of anthropology developed by the pioneers in the task of nation building in Indian anthropology beyond its colonial legacy(Guha, 2021: 59-75 & 2022a & b).
Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editorial board of the Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society for inviting me to write this Editorial. I am also indebted to Sumahan Bandyopadhyay, editor, Man in India for first inspiring me to write an article on public anthropology in the Centenary issue of the journal.
REFERENCES

Bangstad, S. 2017.Anthropological publics, public anthropology: an introduction. In: Anthropology of Our Times: An Edited Anthology in Public Anthropology, S. Bangstad (ed.) pp.1-27. New York, Springer Nature. Barth, F. 2001. Envisioning a More Public Anthropology: Interview with Fredrik Barth by Robert Borofsky. (https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sunyculturalanthropology/chapter/barth/ accessed on 03.10.2021).
Basu, A. 1974. An anthropologist in search of a purpose: the test-case of the Pahira of Manbhum. Indian Museum Bulletin 9 (2):17-23. Borofsky, R. 2019. An Anthropology of Anthropology: Is it Time to Shift Paradigms? Kailua Hi, Center for a Public Anthropology. Borofsky, R. and Lauri, A. 2019.Public anthropology in changing times. Public Anthropologist 1:3-19 Borofsky, R. 2002. The four subfields: Anthropologists as mythmakers. American Anthropologist 104(2):463-480. —————- 2000b. Public anthropology. Where to? What next? Anthropology News, May, pp.9-10. Borofsky, R.(Ed.) 2023. Revitalizing Anthropology: Let’s Focus the Field on Benefitting Others. Kailua. Center for a Public Anthropology Beck, S. 2009. Introduction: Public anthropology. Anthropology in Action 16(2): 1–13. Das, T. C. 1941. Cultural anthropology in the service of the individual and the nation. Presidential address delivered in the section of anthropology in the twenty-eighth Indian Science Congress, pp. 1–29): Benares, Indian Science Congress Association. Fassin, D. 2018. The public presence of anthropology: a critical approach. kristiketnografi—Swedish Journal of Anthropology 1(1):13-23. Ganguly, P. 1975. The Negritos of Little Andaman Islands: a primitive people facing extinction. Indian Museum Bulletin 10(1): 7-27. Guha, A. 2021. Nation building on the margins: how the anthropologists of India contributed? Sociological Bulletin 70(1): 59-75. Guha, A. 2022a. Enhancing the public visibility of anthropology: An auto-ethnographic account of the journey of a practitioner. Man in India. 102(3-4): 175-196 Besteman, C. 2013. Three reflections on public anthropology. Anthropology Today 29(6):3-6. —————- 2000a.To laugh or cry? Anthropology News. February, pp.9-10. Barth, F. 2001. Envisioning a More Public Anthropology: Interview with Fredrik Barth by Robert Borofsky. (https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sunyculturalanthropology/chapter/barth/ accessed on 03.10.2021). Guha, A. 2022b. Nation-Building in Indian Anthropology: Beyond the Colonial Encounter. New Delhi, Manohar and London, Routledge. Das, T. C. 1949. Bengal Famine (1943): As Revealed in a Survey of the Destitutes of Calcutta. Calcutta, University of Calcutta.
Calcutta, Department of Anthropology, Government of India.
Guha, B. S. 1959. Studies in social tensions among the refugees from eastern Pakistan [Memoir no. 1]. Calcutta, Department of Anthropology, Government of India. Gusterson, H. 2013. Anthropology in the news? Anthropology Today 29(6):11-13. Huizer, G. 1979.Anthropology and politics: from naiveté: toward liberation. In: The Politics of Anthropology: From Colonialism and Sexism Toward a View from Below, G.Huizer and B.Mannheim (eds.) pp.3-41. The Hague, Mouton Publishers. Ingold, T. 2018. Anthropology: Why it Matters?Cambridge, Polity Press. Karve, I., and Nimbkar, J. 1969. A Survey of the People Displaced through the Koyna dam. Poona, Deccan College. McGranahan, C. 2006. Introduction: public anthropology. India Review 5(3-4):255-267. Pellissery, S. 2014. Anthropology’s contributions to public policy: introduction to special issue. Indian Anthropologist 44(1):1-20. Sinha, S. 1955. Resettlement of East Pakistan Refugees in Andaman Islands. Calcutta, Government of West Bengal. Peacock, J.L. 1997. The future of anthropology. American Anthropologist 99(1):9-17. Sarkar, S. S. 1951. The place of human biology in anthropology and its utility in the service of the nation. Man in India 31(1): 1–22. Schepher-Huges, N. 2009. Making anthropology public. Anthropology Today 25(4):1-3. Singer, M. 2000.Why I am not a public anthropologist? Anthropology News September: 6-7. End Notes Roy Burman, B. K. 1961. Social Processes in the Industrialization of Rourkela (with reference to displacement and rehabilitation of Tribal and other backward people).New Delhi, Office of the Registrar General, India. Tauber, E. and Zinn, D. (Eds.) 2015.The Public Value of Anthropology: Engaging Critical Social Issues Through Ethnography. Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano University Press. Vine, D. 2011. “Public Anthropology” in its second decade: Robert Borofsky’s Center for a Public Anthropology. American Anthropologist (New Series) 113(2):336-340. Shore, C. 1996. Anthropology’s identity crisis: the politics of public image. Anthropology Today 12(2):2-5.
End Notes

For a recent interesting discussion one may read the first chapter of Tim Ingold’s book Anthropology: why it matters (2018). As regards field and laboratory Ingold moved further to view fieldwork as an activity where the anthropologists take others seriously and receive knowledge from the people whom they study
The editorial board of the journal of Public Anthropology is dominated by the anthropologists of USA and European countries with only 4 members of from Peru, China, South Africa and Japan out of 43 members (https://brill.com/view/journals/puan/puanoverview.xml?contents=editorialContent-48382. Accessed on 11.10.2021).
The potential of the biological and social-cultural anthropologists towards nation building in post-colonial India was highlighted by T.C.Das and S.S.Sarkar in their Indian Science Congress lectures in 1941 and 1951(Das, 1941; Sarkar, 1951). Amitabha Basu, a student of Das and Sarkar carried their legacy and raised the issue of moral commitment of the Indian anthropologists towards the people from whom we collect our data (Basu, 1974).
Interestingly, Frederik Barth in his interview entitled ‘Envisioning a more public anthropology’ taken by Rob th Borofsky on 18 April 2001 mentioned that there was more ‘public interest’ in anthropology and anthropologists in India, Mexico Brazil ,and in Scandinavia(Barth 2001). In the rest of his interview Barth, however did not elaborate on this statement (Center for Public Anthropology 2001 https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sunyculturalanthropology/chapter/barth/ accessed on 03.10.2021).
Former Professor in Anthropology, Vidyasagar University & Former Senior Fellow, Indian Council of Social Science Research
Institute of Development Studies Kolkata
E-mail Id: aguhavu@gmail.com