Elite Discourse

One of the questions to explore are elite formations and their modes of power. In particular, how is power embodied, established and communicated in elite discourse? Particularly in the Indian context, these formations are deeply embedded in contemporary historical memory and to a significant extent constitute the angst about speaking historically at all and to thereby be at risk of erasing the nation...

Chapter 1, verse 40

Chapter 1, verse 40, Bhagvad Gita. 

adharmabhibhavat krsna

pradusyanti kula-striyah

strisu dustasu varsneya

jayate varna-sankarah

Here, the roots ‘praduSta’ and ‘duSta’ could be translated as ‘polluted,’ ‘defiled’ or ‘corrupted,’ signifying an important slippage of meanings.

Marginalist Economic Thought and Social Facts

Social ‘facts’ in the Durkheimian sense appear largely outside the purview of marginalist economic thought; even institutional analysis, which has made its dramatic re-entry within the domain recently, is heavily stripped down from its sociological complexity to represent analytically abridged phenomena,

Corruption as value judgment

Corruption is a value judgment about deep social injustice, often in a given context, but an important issue with regarding to defining the word or, more importantly, identifying particular instances as displaying corruption, is whether this normative assessment can be defended at some level of universality. That would require accepting an ethic, which in this case, could be solidarity. Solidarity presents itself as the bare social fact of community but is also rarely operable as such over sustained periods. The hegemony (of community) that it implies could for instance be probed for the extent and types of power formations and resulting violence. The origin of corruption is the deepening of injustice that proliferates across society, beyond such an extent that further pretexts of solidarity cannot be sustained. It implies fracture at compound sites or neatly into narrow oligarchies and the rest, but the recognition of this of fissure could itself take generations.

Rainer Forst

A universal ethic could be minimalist, as in Rainer Forst’s right to justification. The liberal ethic demands more commitment in reasoning, but may be more commonly applied in fact than one might believe – sympathy’s positivism confirms this[1].

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[1] Animal studies too.

B. Baksheesh and Corruption

Baksheesh is a salutation, not a potlatch, a way of acknowledging and rewarding strangers simply for their company, not a demonstration of power. But it is also a bribe, in that it obliges reciprocity, for to refuse is rude. If baksheesh promotes solidarity, it is not corrupting of society at least in one dimension. What then is bribery?

Milind Wakankar, wow

"One could argue that moral techniques are fine-tuned at the threshold of their future incorporation into religion, or prior to their "ethicization" in religious prescription. The anthropologist and philosopher of religion, Gananath Obeyesekere, follows Weber in defining "ethicization" a.s the point at which "a morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action" (2002: 75). Here is one account of the institution of religion. This happens when moral art is retroactively rendered as "religious," overlooking the very relation established in earlier traditions between life as lived toward-death and the act of dying for another."
P14 Milind Wakankar Subalternity and Religion