[Reader-list] Seminar at NMML on 18 October 2011 at 3:00 p.m.

[rohitrellan at aol.in]

The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
cordially invites you to 
The Tuesday Seminar
on 
 
‘Individuating pre-capitalist economic formations’
 
 
Date: Tuesday, 18th October 2011 
Time: 3.00 PM
Venue: Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building.
 
Speaker:
Dr. Vishwa Mohan Jha is an Associate Professor of History, Atma Ram Sanatan Dharm College, University of Delhi. 
 
Abstract:
 
The phenomenal increase in our knowledge of pre-capitalist societies has not been attended with the matching efforts at their systematic classification by theorists. My current work at individuating economic and political formations among agrarian class societies (as distinct from, say, hunting-fishing-gathering societies) seeks in a small way to redress this imbalance. 
The lecture will focus on four out of the several key issues that must be addressed for a beginning in the proper direction. First, there is a need to adopt, develop, and refine a terminology that is independent of association with any specific language so that a term becomes a general working concept. This need has acquired some urgency in view of a tendency among historians to a progressive atomization of terminology that has accordingly become more and more immune to comparative analysis as well as incompatible with a general scheme of classification. Second, analysis and description of economic formations suffer not infrequently also from the multiple meanings that are given to a single term, e.g. feudal, semi-feudal, or serfdom. Very often, however, these meanings are interrelated, and we need to understand the intellectual processes behind the phenomenon of conceptual confusion. Third, a critical re-look is needed at the fairly common idea that all pre-capitalist production relations in agrarian societies are marked by non-economic coercion. As a part of this, a case will be made finally for according a greater and more rigorous conceptual attention to farm tenancy than has been the case so far.
 
All are welcome.
Those wishing to have their names added to the e-mail list may please e-mail us at:
nmmldirector at gmail.com







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Centre for Contemporary Studies
NMML