WINTER SCHOOL
ON
Community, Tribes and Modernity

A most frequently used concept in the human sciences such as anthropology, sociology, political science and history is the concept of a community. In recent times the idea of a community has also acquired a great deal of importance in philosophical debates. It is inevitable that the variety of uses of this idea in diverse academic disciplines will influence each other- in many cases in a tacit or subterranean fashion. Apart from the more or less technical use of the concept of a community in these various disciplines, it has also entered into common everyday vocabulary in phrases such as ‘the international community’, ‘the business community’, ‘the student community’ etc. Since very far reaching arguments in these disciplines centre round the idea of a community and that of its supposed opposite, the individual, it is of the utmost importance that we have before us as clear a map of this concept as possible for clarity of debate.

Another related idea is that of a tribe. Although this idea has a fairly well demarcated use in the discipline of anthropology, its use, like that of the concept of a community, has acquired a very significantly variegated proportion in contemporary intellectual parlance. Occasionally the employment of this concept in the practical political domain can be quite bewildering.

The two concepts of a tribe and a community together play a pervasive role particularly in our political debates within the framework of a democratic structure. There is also a tacit assumption that the two are most intimately connected. And yet there is very little analytic debate about either or about their inter-relationship.

In the context of the very wide use of the idea of a community and that of a tribe, the following aspects of modernity need to be seriously re-examined:

I. Liberalism and its focus on the individual.
II. Universal acceptability of certain values.
III. Context-independence of reasonability and truth.
IV. Moral responsibility of institutions and individuals for past actions of which they were not part. (Such responsibility as ground for “affirmative action”.)
V. The gulf between the so called global community and the geographically delimited tribal community.

The proposed winter school will be devoted (in the form of lectures, seminars, presentations by participants) to issues to the three areas mentioned above. It is clear that problems that will come up for consideration will relate to fields such as culture, religion, identity, corporations, globalisation and preservation of different ways of being human. Eminent scholars in the fields of politics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy and literature will be invited to give lectures, hold seminars and interact informally with the participants. The participants will be required to make presentations and take active part in all the discussions.