Dissenting Voices against Identities and Power Structures: A Study of NonConformist Deras in Contemporary Punjab (India)

The concept of dissent is important to discover the complete horizon of a societys symbolic values, it is also necessary to map out its transgressions, interrogate its deviants, discern phenomena of rejection and refusal. From the time of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it has been widely acknowledged that language plays a pivotal role in our construction of reality and the way we act on that reality. This insight has been further consolidated in the field of ethno semantics whose proponents assert that all culturally significant phenomena tend to be reflected in lexical, grammatical or syntactic structures. Clifford Geertz studies symbolic anthropology in his book Interpretation of Cultures. He understands culture as a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about life. In this process insights are provided by common language, philosophy and literary analysis and this could be a major explanatory force in the field of social sciences. Culture is essentially semiotic in nature which according to Max Weber is defined as a web of significance in which man as an animal is suspended which he himself has spun. The analysis of the semiotic nature of culture is not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.