GST Alum, Diana Mora Bermejo (2021) gets published
Diana Mora Bermejo, ’21, published: Caste and Casteism in Sociological Scholarship in Sociology Between the Gaps: Forgotten and Neglected Topics: Vol. 6.
Abstract:
Caste is a central topic in the study of sociology in India. The author asks the question of how the conceptualizations of caste have changed over time and explores the study of caste in the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology, a leading sociological journal in India, over a fifty-year period of its publication.1,2 The author examines 667 scholarly articles published between 1967 and 2016. She reports that 81% of these articles contain some mention of caste; and that caste is a central focus of inquiry for 31% of the published articles. Among the articles in which caste as a central focus of inquiry, the author completed a discourse analysis on a sample of 20% of the articles. She finds that the conceptualizations of caste change over time, shifting from a focus on caste’s ritual aspects to how it affects peoples’ everyday social, economic, and political lives. The findings reported here highlight the ways that the mainstream sociological scholarship conceptualizes caste and support the critique of scholars who note important limitations in the mainstream scholarship on caste. These limitations include insufficient attention to the lived experiences of Dalit women and how caste and gender intersect more broadly; minimal focus on the specific mechanisms by which caste power reproduces itself among caste elites in the contemporary period; and limited details on the contributions of historically discriminated castes to the development of Indian and global society. Although some of these areas have been explored in detail by sociologists outside of mainstream publications and by scholars from sister disciplines, inattention or omission within a discipline that devotes so much attention to the study of caste provides further evidence for the need to diversify sociology and its gatekeepers.
