Views on ‘The Third World Anthropology’ and S.C. Dube’s Range of Involvement with the Issues Generated

Shyama Charan Dube, a pioneering sociologist-cum-anthropologist of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and even 1990s, has contributed to a wide range of topics of contextual significance, including tribes, villages, nations, community development, modernisation, change management, tradition and cultural heritage. My intention here is not to undertake a comprehensive review of his works to ascertain their relevance in the contemporary situation, which would be a stupendous task and has already been attempted to some extent by various scholarly bodies and individuals in their individual capacities. Here, I would rather focus on an area with which Dube was either directly or indirectly connected and which carries some meaning for anthropology as it has been trying to gain currency in today’s world. The reason why I have picked up this area is that Dube’s involvement with it has produced some positive responses of far-reaching implications. Incidentally, the state of Third World Anthropology during Dube’s time had kept him grossly engaged, and he even made attempts to see the outcome of it from the larger social science perspective. Just as the Third World countries, even after their liberation from the clutches of the colonial power, could not completely avoid the dominating influence of the First World in the sphere of political economy, the traditional cultures, even where they could manage to survive, have come under the gripping impact of Westernisation and Globalisation, bringing about significant changes in their mode of functioning. From the national perspective, all these issues could be the source of many contradictions and complexities of varying dimensions. Suppose one looks at the subject from S.C. Dube’s point of view. In that case, it might very well reveal the underlying tension reflected in the conflict of interest between appreciating the value of the anthropological-sociological approach to understand society and culture at the grassroots, and at the same time abiding by the provisions of the nation as underlined by the state from time to time.