Delhi University to introduce course on role of tech in marriage, religion

The university is in the process of finalising the seventh and eighth semester syllabi for the first batch of fourth year

Delhi University’s (DU) anthropology department will introduce three courses in its upcoming seventh and eight semesters called “Anthropology of Technology”, “Primate Behaviour”, and “Anthropology of Public Policy”, in which it will teach the role of technology in social institutions such as marriage and religion, how behavioural patterns of non-human primates can be studied to understand human behaviour, and anthropological approaches to public policy, a department official told HT on Thursday.

Delhi University’s (DU) anthropology department will introduce three courses in its upcoming seventh and eight semesters. (HT Archive)

The university is in the process of finalising the seventh and eighth semester syllabi for the first batch of fourth year, scheduled to begin this year under the National Education Policy 2020.

“The department’s syllabus for the upcoming fourth year (seventh and eighth semesters) were approved by the academic council in the last week of December 2024. The idea was to experiment with innovative ideas. In this technology driven era, we feel students need to study how technology impacts our society and even topics like crime, social relationships and social harmony,” said a department official, requesting anonymity.

Anthropology of Technology

This discipline specific elective (DSE) course is a new addition to the eighth semester. According to the proposal, which HT has seen, the primary focus will be on objectives like “understanding the role of social and cultural factors in technological innovations and usage” and “understanding the ways in which technological advancements re-constitute social and cultural realities around us”.

The paper has been divided into four units.

The second unit will cover topics such as “role of technology in re-constituting social institutions; kinship, marriage, family, religion, economy, polity”. The third unit will deal with “exploring cyber spaces, social media platforms, virtual realities, the internet and meta-universe in ethnographic context”.

The fourth unit will cover “uses and applications of artificial intelligence, social robotics; human-machine relationships…digital anthropology...future concerns and critique of post-human anthropology”.

Anthropology of Public Policy

Another eighth semester course, this will focus on “concept and approaches of anthropology of public policy”.

“Public policy is a domain majorly covered in economics and political science, where they are usually dealing with a wide spectrum of information and data. We wanted to introduce a paper which would look at the same topics through a microscopic lens, sensitive to local cultures,” the official added.

The paper will also cover colonial and post-colonial India in the context of public policies.

Primate Behaviour

This course will be introduced for seventh semester students and will focus on “behavioural patterns of non-human primates as a model for understanding human behaviour”.

“In the evolution of humans, we consider a lot of behaviour like kinship, preferential mating or even dominance of certain social groups as exclusive. However, we wanted to trace the behaviour of non-human primates to understand these behavioural patterns better,” the official said.

According to the syllabus, topics such as “primate cognition, language and communication patterns among non-human primates...social context and function of primate communication as precursor to human communication”, “mother-infant relationship” and other areas will be studied as well, leading up to “primate culture as a precursor to human culture”.