Sociology XI Introducing Sociology

INTRODUCING SOCIOLOGYTEXTBOOK FOR CLASS XI

First EditionMarch 2006 Phalguna 1927

ReprintedDecember 2007 Agrahayana 1929December 2008 Pausa 1930January 2010 Magha 1931January 2011 Magha 1932

PD 15T RNB

© National Council of EducationalResearch and Training, 2006

`̀̀̀̀ 35.00

Printed on 80 GSM paper withNCERT watermark

Published at the PublicationDepartment by the Secretary, NationalCouncil of Educational Research andTraining, Sri Aurobindo Marg,New Delhi 110 016 and printedat M/s Sagar Offset Printer Pvt. Ltd.,Plot No 518, Ecotech III, UdyogKendra-IInd, Greater Noida, U.P.

ISBN 81-7450-533-4

ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDNo part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievalsystem or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the priorpermission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way oftrade, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise disposed of withoutthe publisher’s consent, in any form of binding or cover other thanthat in which it is published.

The correct price of this publication is the price printed on thispage, Any revised price indicated by a rubber stamp or by a stickeror by any other means is incorrect and should be unacceptable.

OFFICES OF THE PUBLICATIONDEPARTMENT, NCERT

NCERT CampusSri Aurobindo MargNew Delhi 110 016 Phone : 011-26562708

108, 100 Feet RoadHosdakere Halli ExtensionBanashankari III StageBangalore 560 085 Phone : 080-26725740

Navjivan Trust BuildingP.O.NavjivanAhmedabad 380 014 Phone : 079-27541446

CWC CampusOpp. Dhankal Bus StopPanihatiKolkata 700 114 Phone : 033-25530454

CWC ComplexMaligaonGuwahati 781 021 Phone : 0361-2674869

Publication Team

Head, PublicationDepartment : Neerja Shukla

Chief ProductionOfficer : Shiv Kumar

Chief Editor : Shveta Uppal

Chief BusinessManager : Gautam Ganguly

Assistant Editor : R. N. Bhardwaj

Production Assistant : Prakash Veer Singh

CoverShweta Rao

FOREWORD

The National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005, recommends thatchildren’s life at school must be linked to their life outside the school.This principle marks a departure from the legacy of bookish learningwhich continues to shape our system and causes a gap between theschool, home and community. The syllabi and textbooks developed onthe basis of NCF signify an attempt to implement this basic idea. Theyalso attempt to discourage rote learning and the maintenance of sharpboundaries between different subject areas. We hope these measureswill take us significantly further in the direction of a child-centred systemof education outlined in the National Policy on Education (1986).

The success of this effort depends on the steps that school principalsand teachers will take to encourage children to reflect on their ownlearning and to pursue imaginative activities and questions. We mustrecognise that, given space, time and freedom, children generate newknowledge by engaging with the information passed on to them by adults.Treating the prescribed textbook as the sole basis of examination is oneof the key reasons why other resources and sites of learning are ignored.Inculcating creativity and initiative is possible if we perceive and treatchildren as participants in learning, not as receivers of a fixed body ofknowledge.

These aims imply considerable change in school routines and modeof functioning. Flexibility in the daily time-table is as necessary as rigourin implementing the annual calendar so that the required number ofteaching days are actually devoted to teaching. The methods used forteaching and evaluation will also determine how effective this textbookproves for making children’s life at school a happy experience, ratherthan a source of stress or boredom. Syllabus designers have tried toaddress the problem of curricular burden by restructuring andreorienting knowledge at different stages with greater consideration forchild psychology and the time available for teaching. The textbookattempts to enhance this endeavour by giving higher priority and spaceto opportunities for contemplation and wondering, discussion in smallgroups, and activities requiring hands-on experience.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)appreciates the hard work done by the textbook development committeeresponsible for this book. We wish to thank the Chairperson of theadvisory group in Social Sciences, Professor Hari Vasudevan and theChief Advisor for this book, Professor Yogendra Singh for guiding thework of this committee. Several teachers contributed to the developmentof this textbook; we are grateful to their principals for making thispossible. We are indebted to the institutions and organisations whichhave generously permitted us to draw upon their resources, materialand personnel. We are especially grateful to the members of the NationalMonitoring Committee, appointed by the Department of Secondary andHigher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development under theChairpersonship of Professor Mrinal Miri and Professor G.P. Deshpande,for their valuable time and contribution. As an organisation committedto systemic reform and continuous improvement in the quality of itsproducts, NCERT welcomes comments and suggestions which will enableus to undertake further revision and refinement.

DirectorNew Delhi National Council of Educational20 December 2005 Research and Training

iv

TEXTBOOK DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE

CHAIRPERSON, ADVISORY COMMITTEE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE TEXTBOOKS AT THE HIGHER

SECONDARY LEVEL

Hari Vasudevan, Professor, Department of History, University of Kolkata,Kolkata

CHIEF ADVISOR

Yogendra Singh, Emeritus Porfessor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems,Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

MEMBERS

Anjan Ghosh, Fellow, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata

Arshad Alam, Lecturer , Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies, Jamia MiliaIslamia, New Delhi

Arvind Chouhan, Professor, Department of Sociology, Barkatullah University,Bhopal

Debal Singh Roy, Professor , Department of Sociology, Indira Gandhi NationalOpen University, New Delhi

Dinesh Kumar Sharma, Professor , Department of Education in SocialSciences and Humanities, NCERT

Jitendra Prasad, Professor, Department of Sociology, Mahrishi DayanandUniversity, Rohtak

M.N. Karna, Professor (Retd.), Department of Sociology, North Eastern HillUniversity, Shillong

Maitrayee Chaudhuri, Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems,Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Manju Bhatt, Professor, Department of Education in Social Sciences andHumanities, NCERT

Pushpesh Kumar, Doctoral Fellow, Institute of Economic Growth, Universityof Delhi, Delhi

Rajesh Mishra, Professor, Department of Sociology, Lucknow University,Lucknow

Rajiv Gupta, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Rajasthan,Jaipur

S. Srinivasa Rao, Assistant Professor, Zakir Husain Centre for EducationalStudies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Satish Deshpande, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Delhi,Delhi

Soumendra Mohan Patnayak, Professor, Department of Anthropology,University of Delhi, Delhi

Subhangi Vaidya, Assistant Director, Regional Service Division, Indira GandhiNational Open University, New Delhi

MEMBER-COORDINATOR

Sarika Chandrawanshi Saju, Assistant Professor , Department of Educationin Social Sciences and Humanities, NCERT

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The National Council of Educational Research and Training acknowledgesKaruna Chanana, Professor (Retd.), Zakir Husain Centre for EducationalStudies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Abha Awasthi, Professor(Retd.), Department of Sociology, Lucknow University, Lucknow; Madhu Nagla,Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Mahrishi Dayanand University, Rohtak;Disha Nawani, Lecturer, Gargi College, New Delhi; Vishvaraksha, Lecturer ,Department of Sociology, University of Jammu, Jammu; Sudershan Gupta,Lecturer, Govertment Higher Secondary School, Paloura, Jammu; MandeepChaudhary, PGT Sociology, Guru Harkishan Public School, New Delhi;Rita Khanna, PGT Sociology , Delhi Public School, New Delhi; Seema Banerjee,PGT Sociology, Laxman Public School, New Delhi; Madhu Sharan, ProjectDirector, Hand-in-Hand, Chennai; Balaka Dey, Programme Associate, UnitedNations Development Programme, New Delhi; Niharika Gupta, Freelance Editor,New Delhi; Jesna Jayachandaran, Research Scholar, Jawaharlal NehruUniversity, New Delhi for providing their feedback and inputs.

Acknowledgements are due to Savita Sinha, Professor and Head ,Department of Education in Social Sciences and Humanities for her support.

The Council expresses gratitude to Jan Breman and Parthiv Shah for usingphotographs from their book, Working in the mill no more, published by OxfordUniversity Press, Delhi. Some photographs were taken from the Department ofTourism, Government of India, New Delhi; National Museum, New Delhi; TheTimes of India, The Hindu, Outlook and Frontline. The Council thanks the authors,copyright holders and publishers of these reference materials. The Councilalso acknowledges the Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Information andBroadcasting, New Delhi for allowing to use photographs available in theirphoto library. Some photographs were given by John Suresh Kumar, SynodicalBoard of Social Service; J. John of Labour File, New Delhi; V. Suresh Chennaiand R.C. Das of Central Institute of Educational Technology, NCERT, New Delhi.The Council acknowledges their contribution.

Special thanks are due to Vandana R. Singh, Consultant Editor, NCERT forgoing through the manuscript and suggesting relevant changes.

The Council also gratefully acknowledges the contributions of Mamta, DTP Operator; Shreshtha, Proof Reader and Dinesh Kumar, Incharge, ComputerStation in shaping this book. We are also grateful to Publication Department,NCERT for all their support.

A NOTE TO THE TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

This book is an introductory invitation to sociology. It is not meant to be acomprehensive and exhaustive account of the discipline. Instead it seeksto give a sense of what sociology does and how it helps us understand bothsociety and our own lives better. The book hopes to familiarise studentswith the sociological perspective, its concepts and tools of research. It seeksto show how sociology as a discipline engages with the fact that each of us,as members of society have commonsensical ideas and understandingsabout society. How is sociology as a body of knowledge distinguishable fromthe body of common sense knowledge that necessarily exists in society? Isit distinguishable by its method and approach? Is it different because itcontinuously asks critical questions, because it accepts nothing as takenfor granted?

We could keep adding many more such questions. For sociology is asubject that trains us to question and understand why and how societyfunctions the way it does. And hence there is a need to be clear about theterms and concepts that sociology uses, for they are necessary tools in oursociological understanding.

Apart from the critical perspective that sociology entails, it is also markedby diverse and contending approaches. This plurality is its strength. Thedifferent views within sociology about society can be fruitfully understoodas debates. Debates often help us understand a phenomena better.

In keeping with the questioning and plural spirit of sociology, the bookcontinuously engages with the reader to think and reflect, to relate what ishappening to society and to us as individuals. The activities built into thetext are therefore an intrinsic part of the book. The text and activitiesconstitute an integrative whole. One cannot be done without the other. Forthe objective here is not just to provide ready made information about societybut to understand society.

Society itself is plural, diverse and unequal. The book seeks to capturethis complexity in each of the chapters. Both examples and activities seekto bring this in. The activities are therefore, essential part of the text. Yetlike all books, this is just a beginning. And much of the most exciting learningprocess will take place in the classroom. Students and teachers will perhapsthink of far better ways, activities and examples and suggest how textbookscan be bettered.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD iii

A NOTE TO THE TEACHER AND STUDENTS viii

1. SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIETY 1

2. TERMS, CONCEPTS AND THEIR USE IN SOCIOLOGY 24

3. UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 40

4. CULTURE AND SOCIALISATION 63

5. DOING SOCIOLOGY: RESEARCH METHODS 82

market that decides which subjectchoice may increase or decrease yourchances in the job market. The thirdand fourth advice complicate the mattereven more. It is not just our personaleffort or just the job market that makesa difference — our gender and family orsocial background also matter.

Individual efforts matter a great dealbut do not necessarily define outcomes.As we saw there are other social factorsthat play an important role in the finaloutcome. Here we have only mentionedthe ‘job market’, the ‘socioeconomicbackground’ and ‘gender’. Can youthink of other factors? We could wellask, “Who decides what is a ‘good job’?”Do all societies have similar notions ofwhat is a “good job?” Is money thecriteria? Or is it respect or socialrecognition or individual satisfactionthat decides the worth of a job? Doculture and social norms have any roleto play?

The individual student must studyhard to do well. But how well h/shedoes is structured by a whole set ofsocietal factors. The job market isdefined by the needs of the economy.

CHAPTER 1

SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIETY

I

INTRODUCTION

Let us begin with some suggestionsthat are often made to young studentslike you. One advice often made is,“Study hard and you will do well inlife.” The second advice as often madeis, “ If you do this subject or set ofsubjects you will have a better chanceof getting a good job in the future”. Thethird could be, “ As a boy this does notseem a correct choice of subject” or “Asa girl, do you think your choice ofsubjects is a practical one?” The fourth,“Your family needs you to get a job soonso why choose a profession that willtake a very long time” or “You will joinyour family business so why do youwish to do this subject?”

Let us examine the suggestions. Doyou think the first advice contradictsthe other three? For the first advicesuggests that if you work very hard, youwill do very well and get a good job.The onus rests upon the individual. Thesecond advice suggests that apart fromyour individual effort, there is a job

2 INTRODUCING SOCIOLOGY

The needs of the economy are againdetermined by the economic andpolitical policies pursued by thegovernment. The chances of theindividual student are affected both bythese broader political and economicmeasures as well as by the socialbackground of her/his family. Thisgives us a preliminary sense of howsociology studies human society as aninterconnected whole. And how societyand the individual interact with eachother. The problem of choosing subjectsin the senior secondary school is asource of personal worry for theindividual student. That this is abroader public issue, affecting studentsas a collective entity is self evident. Oneof the tasks of sociology is to unravelthe connection between a personalproblem and a public issue. This is thefirst theme of this chapter.

We have already seen that a ‘goodjob’ means different things to differentsocieties. The social esteem that aparticular kind of job has or does nothave for an individual depends on theculture of his/her ‘relevant society’.What do we mean by ‘relevant society’?Does it mean the ‘society’ the individualbelongs to? Which society does theindividual belong to? Is it theneighbourhood? Is it the community?Is it the caste or tribe? Is it theprofessional circle of the parents? Is itthe nation? Second, this chaptertherefore looks at how the individual inmodern times belongs to more than onesociety. And how societies are unequal.

Third, this chapter introducessociology as a systematic study ofsociety, distinct from philosophical andreligious reflections, as well as oureveryday common sense observationabout society. Fourth, this distinct wayof studying society can be betterunderstood if we look back historicallyat the intellectual ideas and materialcontexts within which sociology wasborn and later grew. These ideas andmaterial developments were mainlywestern but with global consequences.Fifth, we look at this global aspect andthe manner in which sociology emergedin India. It is important to rememberthat just as each of us have abiography, so does a discipline.Understanding the history of adiscipline helps understand thediscipline. Finally the scope of sociologyand its relationship to other disciplinesis discussed.

II

THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION:THE PERSONAL PROBLEM AND THE

PUBLIC ISSUE

We began with a set of suggestions thatdrew our attention to how the individualand society are dialectically linked. Thisis a point that sociologists over severalgenerations have been concerned with.C. Wright Mills rests his vision of thesociological imagination precisely inthe unravelling of how the personal andpublic are related.

3SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIETY

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography andthe relations between the two within society. That is its task and promise…Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imaginationworks is between ‘the personal troubles of the milieu’ and ‘the public issuesof social structure’... Troubles occur within the character of the individualand within the range of his immediate relations with others; they have to dowith hisself and with those limited areas of social life of which he is directlyand personally aware... Issues have to do with matters that transcend theselocal environments of the individual and the range of his inner life.The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and thefailure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialised, apeasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes abusinessman. When classes rise or fall, a man is employed or unemployed;when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart or goesbroke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocketlauncher; a store clerk, a radar man; a wife lives alone; a child grows upwithout a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a societycan be understood without understanding both... (Mills 1959).

A homeless couple

Activity 1

Read the text from Mills carefully. Then examine the visual and report below.Do you notice how the visual is of a poor and homeless couple? The sociologicalimagination helps to understand and explain homelessness as a public issue.Can you identify what could be the causes for homelessness? Different groupsin your class can collect information on possible causes for example, employmentpossibilities, rural to urban migration, etc. Discuss these. Do you notice howthe state considers homelessness as a public issue that requires concretemeasures to be taken, for instance, the Indira Awas Yojana?

The Indira Awas Yojana,operationalised from 1999-2000 is a major scheme bythe government’s Ministry ofRural Development (MORD)and Housing and UrbanDevelopment Corporation(HUDCO) to construct housesfree of cost for the poor andthe homeless. Can you thinkof other issues that show theconnection between personalproblems and public issues?


This question of what to focus insociety is indeed central to sociology.We can take Satyajit Ray’s commentsfurther and wonder whether hisdepiction of the village is romantic.It would be interesting to contrast thiswith a sociologist’s account of the Dalitin the village below.

The first time I saw him, he wass i t t ing on the dusty road infront of one of the small thatch-roofed tea shops in the villagewi th h is g lass and saucerplaced conspicuously beside him—a silent signal to the shopkeeperthat an Untouchable wanted to buysome tea. Muli was a gaunt forty-year-old with betel-blackened teeth

who wore his long hair swept back(Freeman 1978).

A quote from Amartya Sen perhapsillustrates well how inequality is centralto differences among societies.

Some Indians are rich; most arenot. Some are very well educated;others are illiterate. Some leadeasy lives of luxury; others toil hardfor little reward. Some are politically

powerful; others cannot influenceanything. Some have greatopportunities for advancement inlife: others lack them altogether.Some are treated with respect bythe police; others are treated likedirt. These are different kinds ofinequality, and each of themrequires serious attention (Sen

2005:210-11).

III

PLURALITIES AND INEQUALITIES

AMONG SOCIETIES

In the contemporary world we belong,in a sense, to more than one ‘society’.When amidst foreigners reference to‘our society’ may mean ‘Indian society’,but when amongst fellow Indians wemay use the term ‘our society’ to denotea linguistic or ethnic community, areligious or caste or tribal society.

This diversity makes decidingwhich ‘society’ we are talking aboutdifficult. But perhaps this difficultyof mapping society is not confined tosociologists alone as the comment belowwill show.

While reflecting on what to focuson in his films, the great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray wondered:

What should you put in your films?What can you leave out? Would youleave the city behind and go to thevillage where cows graze in theendless fields and the shepherdplays the flute? You can make afilm here that would be pure andfresh and have the delicate rhythmof a boatman’s song.Or would you rather go back int ime-way back to the Epics ,where the gods and demons tooksides in the great battle wherebrothers kil led brothers…Or would you rather stay whereyou are, right in the present, inthe heart of this monstrous,teeming, bewildering city, and tryto orchestrate its dizzying contrastsof sight and sound and milieu?


Discuss the visualsWhat kind of pluralities and inequalities do they show?


everyday life and also about others’lives, about our own ‘society’ and alsoabout others’ ‘society’. These are oureveryday notions, our common sensein terms of which we live our lives.However the observations and ideasthat sociology as a discipline makesabout ‘society’ is different from both thatof philosophical reflections andcommon sense.

Observations of philosophical andreligious thinkers are often aboutwhat is moral or immoral in humanbehaviour, about the desirable way ofliving and about a good society.Sociology too concerns itself with normsand values. But its focus is not onnorms and values as they ought to be,as goals that people should pursue. Itsconcern is with the way they functionin actual societies. (In Chapter 3, youwill see how sociology of religion isdifferent from a theological study).Empirical study of societies is animportant part of what sociologists do.This however does not mean thatsociology is not concerned with values.It only means that when a sociologiststudies a society, the sociologist iswilling to observe and collect findings,even if they are not to her/his personalliking.

Peter Berger makes an unusual buteffective comparison to make the point.

Activity 2

The Economic Survey of the Government of India suggests that access tosanitation facilities is just 31 per cent. Find out about other indicators of socialinequality, for instance education, health, employment etc.

IV

INTRODUCING SOCIOLOGY

You have already been acquainted withthe sociological imagination and thecentral concern of sociology to studysociety as an interconnected whole.Our discussion on the individual’schoices and the job market showedhow the economic, political, familial,cultural, educational institutions areinterconnected. And how the individualis both constrained by it and yet canchange it to an extent. The next fewchapters will elaborate on differentinstitutions as well as on culture. It willalso focus on some key terms andconcepts in sociology that will enableyou to understand society. Forsociology is the study of human sociallife, groups and societies. Its subjectmatter is our own behaviour as socialbeings.

Sociology is not the first subject todo so. People have always observed andreflected upon societies and groups inwhich they live. This is evident in thewritings of philosophers, religiousteachers, and legislators of allcivilisations and epochs. This humantrait to think about our lives and aboutsociety is by no means confined tophilosophers and social thinkers. All ofus do have ideas about our own


In any political or military conflictit is of advantage to capture theinformation used by the intelligenceorgans of the opposing side. But thisis so only because good intelligenceconsists of information free of bias.If a spy does his/her reporting interms of the ideology and ambitionsof his/her superiors, his/herreports are useless not only to theenemy, if the latter should capturethem, but also to the spy’s ownside... The sociologist is a spy in verymuch the same way. His/her job isto report as accurately as he/shecan about a certain terrain (Berger1963:16-17).

Does this mean that the sociologisthas no social responsibility to askabout the goals of his/her study or thework to which the sociological findingswill be applied. He/she has such aresponsibility, just like any othercitizen of society. But this asking is notsociological asking. This is like thebiologist whose biological knowledgecan be employed to heal or kill. Thisdoes not mean the biologist is free ofresponsibility as to which use s/heserves. But this is not a biologicalquestion.

Sociology has from its beginningsunderstood itself as a science. Unlikecommonsensical observations orphilosophical reflections or theologicalcommentaries, sociology is bound byscientific canons of procedure. It meansthat the statements that the sociologistarrives at must be arrived at throughthe observations of certain rules of

evidence that allow others to check onor to repeat to develop his/her findingsfurther. There has been considerabledebate within sociology about thedifferences between natural science andhuman science, between quantitativeand qualitative research. We need notenter this here. But what is relevanthere is that sociology in its observationand analysis has to follow certain rulesthat can be checked upon by others.In the next section, we comparesociological knowledge to commonsense knowledge which will once againemphasise the role of methods,procedures and rules in the manner inwhich sociology conducts itsobservation of society. Chapter 5 of thisbook will provide you with a sense ofwhat sociologists do and how they goabout studying society. An elaborationof the differences between sociologyand common sense knowledge willhelp towards a clearer idea of thesociological approach and method.

V

SOCIOLOGY AND COMMON

SENSE KNOWLEDGE

We have seen how sociologicalknowledge is different from theologicaland philosophical observations.Likewise sociology is different fromcommon sense observations. Thecommon sense explanations aregenerally based on what may be called‘naturalistic’ and/or individualisticexplanation. A naturalistic explanationfor behaviour rests on the assumptionthat one can really identify ‘natural’reasons for behaviour.


knowledge have been made, generallyincrementally and only rarely by adramatic breakthrough.

Sociology has a body of concepts,methods and data, no matter howloosely coordinated. This cannot besubstituted by common sense.Common sense is unreflective since itdoes not question its own origins. Orin other words it does not ask itself:“Why do I hold this view?” Thesociologist must be ready to ask of anyof our beliefs, about ourselves — nomatter how cherished — “is this reallyso?” Both the systematic and question-ing approach of sociology is derivedfrom a broader tradition of scientificinvestigation. This emphasis on

Sociology thus breaks away fromboth common sense observations andideas as well as from philosophicalthought. It does not always or evengenerally lead to spectacular results.But meaningful and unsuspectedconnections can be reached only bysifting through masses of connections.Great advances in sociological

Contemporary poverty is causedby the structure of inequality inclass society and is experiencedby those who suffer from chronicirregularity of work and lowwages (Jayaram 1987:3).

People are poor because they areafraid of work, come from‘problem families’, are unable tobudget properly, suffer from lowintelligence and shiftlessness.

Explanation of Naturalistic Sociological

Poverty

Activity 3

An example of poverty has beengiven below and we also touchedupon it in our discussion on thehomeless. Think of other issues andhow they could be explained in anaturalistic and sociological way.

Unsuspected Connections?

In many societies, including in many parts of India, the line of descent andinheritance passes from father to son. This is understood as a patrilineal system.Keeping in mind that women tend not to get property rights, the Government ofIndia in the aftermath of the Kargil War decided that financial compensation forthe death of Indian soldiers should go to their widows so that they were providedfor.

The government had certainly not anticipated the unintended consequenceof this decision. It led to many forced marriages of the widows with their brother-in-law (husband’s brother or dewar). In some cases the brother-in-law (thenhusband) was a young child and the sister-in-law (then wife) a young woman.This was to ensure that the compensation remained with the deceased man’spatrilineal family. Can you think of other such unintended consequences of asocial action or a state measure?


scientific procedures can be understoodonly if we go back in time. Andunderstand the context or socialsituation within which the sociologicalperspective emerged as sociology wasgreatly influenced by the greatdevelopments in modern science. Let ushave a very brief look at whatintellectual ideas went into the makingof sociology.

VI

THE INTELLECTUAL IDEAS THAT WENT

INTO THE MAKING OF SOCIOLOGY

Influenced by scientific theories ofnatural evolution and findings aboutpre-modern societies made by earlytravellers, colonial administrators,sociologists and social anthropologistssought to categorise societies intotypes and to distinguish stages insocial development. These featuresreappear in the 19th century in worksof early sociologists, Auguste Comte,Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer.Efforts were therefore made to classifydifferent types of societies on thatbasis, for instance:

• Types of pre-modern societies suchas hunters and gatherers, pastoraland agrarian, agrarian and non-industrial civilisations.

• Types of modern societies such asthe industrialised societies.

Such an evolutionary visionassumed that the west wasnecessarily the most advanced andcivilised. Non- western societies wereoften seen as barbaric and less

developed. The Indian colonialexperience has to be seen in this light.Indian sociology reflects this tensionwhich “go far back to the history ofBritish colonialism and theintellectual and ideological responseto it…” (Singh 2004:19). Perhapsbecause of this backdrop, Indiansociology has been particularlythoughtful and reflexive of its practice(Chaudhuri 2003). You will beengaging with Indian sociologicalthought, its concerns and practice ingreater detail in the book,Understanding Society (NCERT,2006).

Darwin’s ideas about organicevolution were a dominant influence onearly sociological thought. Society wasoften compared with living organismsand efforts were made to trace itsgrowth through stages comparable tothose of organic life. This way of lookingat society as a system of parts, eachpart playing a given function influencedthe study of social institutions like thefamily or the school and structuressuch as stratification. We mention thishere because the intellectual ideas thatwent into the making of sociology havea direct bearing on how sociologystudies empirical reality.

The Enlightenment, an Europeanintellectual movement of the late 17thand 18th centuries, emphasised reasonand individualism. There was also greatadvancement of scientific knowledgeand a growing conviction that themethods of the natural sciences shouldand could be extended to the study ofhuman affairs. For example poverty, so


far seen as a ‘natural phenomenon’,began to be seen as a ‘social problem’caused by human ignorance orexploitation. Poverty therefore could bestudied and redressed. One way ofstudying this was through the socialsurvey that was based on the belief thathuman phenomena can be classifiedand measured. You will be discussingsocial survey in chapter 5.

Thinkers of the early modern erawere convinced that progress inknowledge promised the solution to allsocial ills. For example, Auguste Comte,the French scholar (1789–1857 ),considered to be the founder ofsociology, believed that sociology wouldcontribute to the welfare of humanity.

VII

THE MATERIAL ISSUES THAT WENT

INTO THE MAKING OF SOCIOLOGY

The Industrial Revolution was basedupon a new, dynamic form of economicactivity — capitalism. This system ofcapitalism became the driving forcebehind the growth of industrialmanufacturing. Capitalism involvednew attitudes and institutions.Entrepreneurs now engaged in thesustained, systematic pursuit of profit.The markets acted as the keyinstrument of productive life. Andgoods, services and labour becamecommodities whose use wasdetermined by rational calculation.

The new economy was completelydifferent from what it replaced. Englandwas the centre of the IndustrialRevolution. In order to understand

how far–reac hing the changeindustrialisation brought about was,we take a quick look at what life in pre-industrial England was like. Beforeindustrialisation, agriculture andtextiles were the chief occupations of theBritish. Most people lived in villages.Like in our own Indian villages, therewere peasants and landlords, theblacksmith and leather worker, theweaver and the potter, the shepherdand the brewer. Society was small. Itwas hierarchical, i.e. the status andclass positions of different people wereclearly defined. Like all traditionalsocieties it was also characterised byclose interaction. With industrialisationeach of these features changed.

One of the most fundamentalaspects of the new order was thedegradation of labour, the wrenchingof work from the protective contexts ofguild, village, and family. Both theradical and conservative thinkers wereappalled at the decline of the status ofthe common labourer, not to mentionthe skilled craftsman.

Urban centres expanded and grew.It was not that there were no citiesearlier. But their character prior toindustrialisation was different. Theindustrial cities gave birth to acompletely new kind of urban world. Itwas marked by the soot and grime offactories, by overcrowded slums of thenew industrial working class, badsanitation and general squalor. It wasalso marked by new kinds of socialinteractions.

The Hindi film song on the nextpage captures both the material as well


From working class neighbourhoods to slum localitites


as the experiential aspects of city life.From the film C.I.D. 1956

Aye dil hai mushkil jeena yahanZara hat ke, zara bach ke, yehhai Bombay meri jaanKahin building kahin traame,kahin motor kahin millMilta hai yahan sab kuchh ik miltanahin dilInsaan ka nahin kahin naam-o-nishaanKahin satta, kahin patta kahin chorikahin resKahin daaka, kahin phaaka kahinthokar kahin thesBekaaro ke hain kai kaam yahanBeghar ko aawara yahan kehte hashasKhud kaate gale sabke kahe iskobusinessIk cheez ke hain kai naam yahanGeeta Bura duniya woh hai kehtaaisa bhola tu na banJo hai karta woh hai bharta haiyahan ka yeh chalan

PARAPHRASE: Dear heart, life is hardhere, you must watch where you’regoing if you want to save yourself, thisis Bombay my dear! You’ll findbuildings, you’ll find trams, you’ll findmotors, you’ll find mills, you’ll findeverything here except a human heart,there’s no trace of humanity here. Somuch of what is done here ismeaningless, it’s either power, or it’smoney, or it’s theft, or it’s cheating. Therich mock the homeless as vagabonds,but when they cut each other’s throatsthemselves, it’s called business! Thesame action is given various names inthis place.

The mass of Indian handicraftsmenruined as a result of the influxof manufactured machine-madegoods of British industries werenot absorbed in any extensivelydeveloped indigenous industries.The ruined mass of thesehandicraftsmen, in the main, tookto agriculture for subsistence(Desai 1975:70).

The factory and its mechanicaldivision of labour were often seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy thepeasant, the artisan, as well as familyand local community. The factory wasperceived as an archetype of aneconomic regimentation hithertoknown only in barracks and prisons.For some like Marx the factory wasoppressive. Yet potentially liberating.Here workers learnt both collective

Activity 4

Note how quickly Britain, the seat

of the Industrial Revolution becamean urban from a predominantlyrural society. Was this process

identical in India?1810: 20 per cent of the populationlived in towns and cities.1910: 80 per cent of the population

lived in towns and cities.Significantly the impact of the

same process was different in India,

Urban centres did grow. But withthe entry of British manufacturedgoods, more people moved into

agriculture.


functioning as well as concertedefforts for better conditions.

Another indicator of the emergenceof modern societies was the newsignificance of clock-time as a basis ofsocial organisation. A crucial aspect ofthis was the way in which, in the 18thand 19th centuries, the tempo ofagricultural and manufacturinglabour increasingly came to be set bythe clock and calendar in a way verydifferent from pre-modern forms ofwork. Prior to the development ofindustrial capitalism, work-rhythmswere set by factors such as the periodof daylight, the break between tasksand the constraints of deadlines orother social duties. Factory productionimplied the synchronisation oflabour — it began punctually, had asteady pace and took place for sethours and on particular days of theweek. In addition, the clock injected anew urgency to work. For bothemployer and employee ‘time is nowmoney: it is not passed but spent.’

VIII

WHY SHOULD WE STUDY THE

BEGINNING AND GROWTH OF SOCIOLOGY

IN EUROPE?

Most of the issues and concerns ofsociology also date back to a time whenEuropean society was undergoingtumultuous changes in the 18th and19th centuries with the advent ofcapitalism and industrialisation. Manyof the issues that were raised then, forexample, urbanisation or factoryproduction, are pertinent to all modernsocieties, even though their specificfeatures may vary. Indeed, Indiansociety with its colonial past andincredible diversity is distinct. Thesociology of India reflects this.

If this is so, why focus on Europe ofthat time? Why is it relevant to startthere? The answer is relatively simple.For our past, as Indians is closelylinked to the history of Britishcapitalism and colonialism. Capitalismin the west entailed a world-wideexpansion. The passages in the box onnext page represent but two strands inthe manner that western capitalismimpacted the world.

R.K. Laxman’s travelogue of Mauritiusbrings home the presence of thiscolonial and global past.

Here Africans and Chinese, Biharisand Dutch, Persians and Tamils,Arabs, French and English all rubmerrily with one another... A Tamil,for instance, bears a deceptivelysouth Indian face and a name to gowith it to boot; Radha Krishna

Activity 5

Find out how work is organised in atraditional village, a factory and acall centre.

Activity 6

Find out how industrial capitalismchanged Indian lives in villages andcities.


Govindan is indeed from Madras. Ispeak to him in Tamil. He surprisesme by responding in a frightfullymangled English with a heavy French

accent. Mr Govindan has noknowledge of Tamil and his tonguehas ceased curling to produce Tamilsounds centuries ago (Laxman 2003) !

IX

THE GROWTH OF SOCIOLOGY IN INDIA

Colonialism was an essential part ofmodern capitalism and industrialisation.The writings of Western sociologists oncapitalism and other aspects of modernsociety are therefore relevant forunderstanding social change in India.Yet as we saw with reference tourbanisation, colonialism implied thatthe impact of industrialisation in Indiawas not necessarily the same as in thewest. Karl Marx’s comments on theimpact of the East India Company bringout the contrast.

India, the great workshop of cotton

manufacture for the world, sinceimmemorial times, now becameinundated with English twists andcotton stuffs. After its own producehad been excluded from England,

or only admitted on the most cruelterms, British manufactures werepoured into it at a small and merelynominal duty, to the ruin of thenative cotton fabrics once so

celebrated (Marx 1853 cited inDesai 1975).

Sociology in India also had to deal withwestern writings and ideas aboutIndian society that were not alwayscorrect. These ideas were expressedboth in the accounts of colonial officialsas well western scholars. For many ofthem Indian society was a contrast towestern society. We take just oneexample here, the way the Indianvillage was understood and portrayedas unchanging.

Capitalism and its global but uneven transformation of societies

Between the 17th and 19th centuries an estimated 24 million Africans wereenslaved. 11 million of them survived the journey to the Americas in one of anumber of great movements of population that feature in modern history. Theywere plucked from their existing homes and cultures, transported around theworld in appalling conditions, and put to work in the service of capitalism.Enslavement is a graphic example of how people were caught up in thedevelopment of modernity against their will. The institution of slavery declinedin the 1800s. But for us in India it was in the 1800s that indentured labour wastaken in ships by the British for running their cotton and sugar plantations indistant lands such as Surinam in South America or in the West Indies or theFiji Islands. V.S. Naipaul the great English writer who won the Nobel prize is adescendant of one of these thousands who were taken to lands they had neverseen and who died without being able to return.


In keeping with contemporary-Victorian-evolutionary ideas, westernwriters saw in the Indian village aremnant or survival from what wascalled “the infancy of society”. They sawin nineteenth-century India the past ofthe European society.

Yet another evidence of the colonialheritage of countries like India is thedistinction often made betweensociology and social anthropology. Astandard western textbook definition ofsociology is “the study of humangroups and societies, giving particularemphasis to the analysis of theindustrialised world” (Giddens 2001:699). A standard western definition ofsocial anthropology would be the studyof simple societies of non-western andtherefore “other” cultures. In India thestory is quite different. M.N. Srinivasmaps the trajectory:

In a country such as India, with itssize and diversity, regional, linguistic,religious, sectarian, ethnic (includingcaste), and between rural and urbanareas, there are a myriad ‘others’...In a culture and society such asIndia’s, ‘the other’ can beencountered literally next door...(Srinivas 1966:205).

Furthermore social anthropology inIndia moved gradually from a pre-occupation with the study of ‘primitivepeople’ to the study of peasants, ethnicgroups, social classes, aspects andfeatures of ancient civilisations, andmodern industrial societies. No rigiddivide exists between sociology andsocial anthropology in India, a

characteristic feature of the twosubjects in many western countries.Perhaps the very diversity of themodern and traditional, of the villageand the metropolitan in India accountsfor this.

X

THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY AND ITS

RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER SOCIAL

SCIENCE DISCIPLINES

The scope of sociological study isextremely wide. It can focus its analysisof interactions between individualssuch as that of a shopkeeper with acustomer, between teachers andstudents, between two friends or familymembers. It can likewise focus onnational issues such as unemploymentor caste conflict or the effect of statepolicies on forest rights of the tribalpopulation or rural indebtedness. Orexamine global social processes suchas: the impact of new flexible labourregulations on the working class; or thatof the electronic media on the young;or the entry of foreign universities onthe education system of the country.What defines the discipline of sociologyis therefore not just what it studies (i.e.family or trade unions or villages) buthow it studies a chosen field.

Sociology is one of a group ofsocial sciences, which also includesanthropology, economics, politicalscience and history. The divisionsamong the various social sciences arenot clearcut, and all share a certainrange of common interests, concepts


Discuss how you think history, sociology, political science, economicswill study fashion/clothes, market places and city streets


and methods. It is therefore veryimportant to understand that thedistinctions of the disciplines are tosome extent arbitrary and should notbe seen in a straitjacket fashion. Todifferentiate the social sciences wouldbe to exaggerate the differences andgloss over the similarities. Furthermorefeminist theories have also shown thegreater need of interdisciplinaryapproach. For instance how would apolitical scientist or economist studygender roles and their implications forpolitics or the economy without asociology of the family or genderdivision of labour.

Sociology and Economics

Economics is the study of productionand distribution of goods and services.The classical economic approach dealtalmost exclusively with the inter-relations of pure economic variables:the relations of price, demand andsupply; money flows; output and inputratios, and the like. The focus oftraditional economics has been on anarrow understanding of ‘economicactivity’, namely the allocation of scarcegoods and services within a society.Economists who are influenced by apolitical economy approach seek tounderstand economic activity in abroader framework of ownership of andrelationship to means of production.The objective of the dominant trend ineconomic analysis was however toformulate precise laws of economicbehaviour.

The sociological approach looksat economic behaviour in a broader

context of social norms, values, practicesand interests. The corporate sectormanagers are aware of this. The largeinvestment in the advertisement industryis directly linked to the need to reshapelifestyles and consumption patterns.Trends within economics such as feministeconomics seek to broaden the focus,drawing in gender as a centralorganising principle of society. Forinstance they would look at how work inthe home is linked to productivity outside.

The defined scope of economics hashelped in facilitating its development asa highly focused, coherent discipline.Sociologists often envy the economistsfor the precision of their terminologyand the exactness of their measures.And the ability to translate the resultsof their theoretical work into practicalsuggestions having major implicationsfor public policy. Yet economists’predictive abilities often sufferprecisely because of their neglect ofindividual behaviour, cultural normsand institutional resistance whichsociologists study.

Activity 7

´ Do you think advertisementsactually influence people’sconsumption patterns?

´ Do you think the idea of whatdefines ‘good life’ is onlyeconomically defined?

´ Do you think ‘spending’ and‘saving’ habits are culturallyformed?


Pierre Bourdieu wrote in 1998.

A true economic science would lookat all the costs of the economy-notonly at the costs that corporationsare concerned with, but also atcrimes, suicides, and so on.

We need to put forward aneconomics of happiness, whichwould take note of all the profits,individual and collective, materialand symbolic, associated withactivity (such as security), and alsothe material and symbolic costsassociated with inactivity orprecarious employment (for exampleconsumption of medicines: Franceholds the world record for the useof tranquilisers), (cited in Swedberg2003).

Sociology unlike economics usuallydoes not provide technical solutions.But it encourages a questioning andcritical perspective. This helpsquestioning of basic assumptions. Andthereby facilitates a discussion of notjust the technical means towards agiven goal, but also about the socialdesirability of a goal itself. Recenttrends have seen a resurgence ofeconomic sociology perhaps because ofboth this wider and critical perspectiveof sociology.

Sociology provides clearer or moreadequate understanding of a socialsituation than existed before. This canbe either on the level of factualknowledge, or through gaining animproved grasp of why something ishappening (in other words, by meansof theoretical understanding).

Sociology and Political Science

As in the case of economics, there is anincreased interaction of methods andapproaches between sociology andpolitical science. Conventional politicalscience was focused primarily on twoelements: political theory andgovernment administration. Neitherbranch involves extensive contact withpolitical behaviour. The theory partusually focuses on the ideas aboutgovernment from Plato to Marx whilecourses on administration generallydeal with the formal structure ofgovernment rather than its actualoperation.

Sociology is devoted to the studyof all aspects of society, whereasconventional political sciencerestricted itself mainly to the study ofpower as embodied in formalorganisation. Sociology stresses theinterrelationships between sets ofinstitutions including government,whereas political science tends to turnattention towards the processes withinthe government.

However, sociology long sharedsimilar interests of research with

Activity 8

Find out the kind of studies that

were conducted during the lastgeneral elections. You will probablyfind both features of political science

and sociology in them. Discuss howdisciplines interact and mutuallyinfluence each other.


political science. Sociologists likeMax Weber worked in what can betermed as political sociology. The focusof political sociology has beenincreasingly on the actual study ofpolitical behaviour. Even in the recentIndian elections one has seen theextensive study of political patterns ofvoting. Studies have also beenconducted in membership of politicalorganisations, process of decision-making in organisations, sociologicalreasons for support of political parties,the role of gender in politics, etc.

Sociology and History

Historians almost as a rule study thepast, sociologists are more interested inthe contemporary or recent past.Historians earlier were content todelineate the actual events, to establishhow things actually happened, while insociology the focus was to seek toestablish causal relationships.

History studies concrete detailswhile the sociologist is more likely toabstract from concrete reality,categorise and generalise. Historianstoday are equally involved in doingsociological methods and concepts intheir analysis.

Conventional history has beenabout the history of kings and war. The

history of less glamorous or excitingevents as changes in land relations orgender relations within the family havetraditionally been less studied byhistorians but formed the core area ofthe sociologist’s interest. Today,however history is far more sociologicaland social history is the stuff of history.It looks at social patterns, genderrelations, mores, customs andimportant institutions other than theacts of rulers, wars and monarchy.

Sociology and Psychology

Psychology is often defined as thescience of behaviour. It involves itselfprimarily with the individual. It isinterested in her/his intelligence andlearning, motivations and memory,nervous system and reaction time,hopes and fears. Social psychology,which serves as a bridge betweenpsychology and sociology, maintains aprimary interest in the individual butconcerns itself with the way in whichthe individual behaves in social groups,collectively with other individuals.

Sociology attempts to understandbehaviour as it is organised in society,that is the way in which personality isshaped by different aspects of society.For instance, economic and politicalsystem, their family and kinshipstructure, their culture, norms andvalues. It is interesting to recall thatDurkheim who sought to establish aclear scope and method for sociologyin his well-known study of suicide leftout individual intentions of those whocommit or try to commit suicide infavour of statistics concerning various

Activity 9

Find out how historians have

written about the history of art, ofcricket, of clothes and fashion, ofarchitecture and housing styles.


social characteristics of theseindividuals.

Sociology and Social Anthropology

Anthropology in most countriesincorporates archaeology, physicalanthropology, cultural history, manybranches of linguistics and the studyof all aspects of life in “simplesocieties”. Our concern here is withsocial anthropology and culturalanthropology for it is that which isclose to the study of sociology.Sociology is deemed to be the study ofmodern, complex societies while socialanthropology was deemed to be thestudy of simple societies.

As we saw earlier, each disciplinehas its own history or biography.Social anthropology developed in thewest at a time when it meant thatwestern-trained social anthropologistsstudied non-European societies oftenthought of as exotic, barbaric anduncivilised. This unequal relationship

between those who studied and thosewho were studied as not remarkedupon too often earlier. But times havechanged and we have the erstwhile‘natives’ be they Indians or Sudanese,Nagas or Santhals, who now speakand write about their own societies.The anthropologists of the pastdocumented the details of simplesocieties apparently in a neutralscientific fashion. In practice they wereconstantly comparing those societieswith the model of the western modernsocieties as a benchmark.

Other changes have also redefinedthe nature of sociology and socialanthropology. Modernity as we saw ledto a process whereby the smallestvillage was impacted by globalprocesses. The most obvious exampleis colonialism. The most remote villageof India under British colonialism sawits land laws and administrationchange, its revenue extraction alter, itsmanufacturing industries collapse.

Tea pickers in Assam


Contemporary global processes havefurther accentuated this ‘shrinking ofthe globe’. The assumption of studyinga simple society was that it wasbounded. We know this is not so today.

The traditional study of simple,non-literate societies by socialanthropology had a pervasive influenceon the content and the subject matterof the discipline. Social anthropologytended to study society (simplesocieties) in all their aspects, as wholes.In so far as they specialised, it was onthe basis of area as for example theAndaman Islands, the Nuers orMelanesia. Sociologists study complexsocieties and would therefore oftenfocus on parts of society like thebureaucracy or religion or caste or aprocess such as social mobility.

Social anthropology was charac-terised by long field work tradition,living in the community studied andusing ethnographic research methods.Sociologists have often relied on surveymethod and quantitative data usingstatistics and the questionnaire mode.Chapter 5 will give you a morecomprehensive account of these twotraditions.

Today the distinction between asimple society and a complex one itselfneeds major rethinking. India itself is acomplex mix of tradition andmodernity, of the village and the city,of caste and tribe, of class andcommunity. Villages nestle right in theheart of the capital city of Delhi. Callcentres serve European and Americanclients from different towns of thecountry.

Indian sociology has been far moreeclectic in borrowing from bothtraditions. Indian sociologists oftenstudied Indian societies that were bothpart of and not of one’s own culture. Itcould also be dealing with bothcomplex differentiated societies ofurban modern India as well as thestudy of tribes in a holistic fashion.

It had been feared that with thedecline of simple societies, socialanthropology would lose its specificityand merge with sociology. Howeverthere have been fruitful interchangesbetween the two disciplines and todayoften methods and techniques aredrawn from both. There have beenanthropological studies of the state andglobalisation, which are very differentfrom the traditional subject matterof social anthropology. On theother hand, sociology too has beenusing quantitative and qualitativetechniques, macro and micro approachesfor studying the complexities of modernsocieties. As mentioned before we willin a sense carry on this discussion inChapter 5 . For in India, sociology andsocial anthropology have had a veryclose relationship.

Activity 10

´ Find out where in India didancestors of the community ofSanthal workers who have beenworking in the tea plantations inAssam come from.

´ When was tea cultivationstarted in Assam?

´ Did the British drink tea beforecolonialism?


GLOSSARY

Capitalism : A system of economic enterprise based on market exchange.“Capital” refers to any asset, including money, property and machines, whichcan be used to produce commodities for sale or invested in a market withthe hope of achieving a profit. This system rests on the private ownership ofassets and the means of production.

Dialectic : The existence or action of opposing social forces, for instance,social constraint and individual will.

Empirical Investigation : A factual enquiry carried out in any given area ofsociological study.

Feminist Theories : A sociological perspective which emphasises thecentrality of gender in analysing the social world. There are many strandsof feminist theory, but they all share in common the desire to explain genderinequalities in society and to work to overcome them.

Macrosociology : The study of large-scale groups, organisations or socialsystems.

Microsociology : The study of human behaviour in contexts of face-to-faceinteraction.

Social Constraint : A term referring to the fact that the groups and societiesof which we are a part exert a conditioning influence on our behaviour.

Values : Ideas held by human individual or groups about what is desirable,proper, good or bad. Differing values represent key aspects of variations inhuman culture.

EXERCISES

1. Why is the study of the origin and growth of sociology important?

2. Discuss the different aspects of the term ‘society’. How is it differentfrom your common sense understanding?

3. Discuss how there is greater give and take among disciplines today.

4. Identify any personal problem that you or your friends or relatives arefacing. Attempt a sociological understanding.


READINGS

BERGER , PETER L. 1963. Invitation to Sociology : A Humanistic Perspective.Penguin, Harmondsworth.

BIERSTEDT, ROBERT. 1970. Social Order. Tata Mc. Graw-Hill Publishing Co. Ltd,Mumbai.

BOTTOMORE, TOM. 1962. Sociology : A Guide to Problems and Literature. George,Allen and Unwin, London.

CHAUDHURI, MAITRAYEE. 2003. The Practice of Sociology. Orient Longman,New Delhi.

DESAI, A.R. 1975. Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Popular Prakashan,Mumbai.

DUBE, S.C. 1977. Understanding Society : Sociology : The Discipline and itsSignificance : Part I. NCERT, New Delhi.

FREEMAN, JAMES M. 1978. ‘Collecting the Life History of an Indian Untouchable’,from VATUK, SYLVIA. ed., American Studies in the Anthropology of India.Manohar Publishers, Delhi.

GIDDENS, ANTHONY. 2001. Sociology. Fourth Edition, Polity Press, Cambridge.

INKELES, ALEX. 1964. What is Sociology? An Introduction to the Discipline andProfession. Prentice Hall, New Jersey.

JAYARAM, N. 1987. Introductory Sociology. Macmillan India Ltd, Delhi.

LAXMAN, R.K. 2003. The Distorted Mirror . Penguin, Delhi.

MILLS, C. WRIGHT. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. Penguin, Harmondsworth.

SINGH, YOGENDRA. 2004. Ideology and Theory in Indian Sociology. RawatPublications, New Delhi.

SRINIVAS, M.N. 2002. Village, Caste. Gender and Method : Essays in IndianSocial Anthropology. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

SWEDBERG, RICHARD. 2003. Principles of Economic Sociology. Princeton UniversityPress, Princeton and Oxford.


CHAPTER 2

TERMS, CONCEPTS AND THEIR USE IN SOCIOLOGY

I

INTRODUCTION

The previous chapter introduced us toan idea both about society as well associology. We saw that a central task ofsociology is to explore the interplay ofsociety and the individual. We also sawthat individuals do not float freely insociety but are part of collective bodieslike the family, tribe, caste, class, clan,nation. In this chapter, we move furtherto understand the kinds of groupsindividuals form, the kinds of unequalorders, stratification systems withinwhich, individuals and groups areplaced, the way social control operates,the roles that individuals have and play,and the status they occupy.

In other words we start exploringhow society itself functions. Is itharmonious or conflict ridden? Arestatus and roles fixed? How is socialcontrol exercised? What kinds ofinequalities exist? The question howeverremains as to why do we need specific

terms and concepts to understand this.Why does sociology need to have aspecial set of terms when we use termslike status and roles or social controlanyway in our everyday life?

For a discipline such as, say,nuclear physics that deals with mattersunknown to most people and for whichno word exists in common speech, itseems obvious that a discipline mustdevelop a terminology. However,terminology is possibly even moreimportant for sociology, just becauseits subject matter is familiar and justbecause words do exist to denote it. Weare so well acquainted with the socialinstitutions that surround us that wecannot see them clearly and precisely(Berger 1976:25).

For example we may feel that sincewe live in families we know all aboutfamilies. This would be conflating orequating sociological knowledgewith common sense knowledge ornaturalistic explanation, which we havediscussed in Chapter 1.

We also found in the previouschapter how sociology as a discipline

25TERMS, CONCEPTS AND THEIR USE IN SOCIOLOGY

has a biography or history. We saw howcertain material and intellectualdevelopments shaped the sociologicalperspective as well as its concerns.Likewise sociological concepts too havea story to tell. Many of the conceptsreflect the concern of social thinkers tounderstand and map the socialchanges that the shift from pre-modernto modern entailed. For instancesociologists observed that simple, smallscale and traditional societies weremore marked by close, often face-to-face interaction. And modern, largescale societies by formal interaction.They therefore distinguished primaryfrom secondary groups, communityfrom society or association. Otherconcepts like stratification reflect theconcern that sociologists had inunderstanding the structuredinequalities between groups in society.

Concepts arise in society. Howeverjust as there are different kinds ofindividuals and groups in society sothere are different kinds of concepts andideas. And sociology itself is marked bydifferent ways of understanding societyand looking at dramatic social changesthat the modern period brought about.

We have seen how even in the earlystage of sociology’s emergence therewere contrary and contestingunderstandings of society. If forKarl Marx class and conflict were keyconcepts to understand society, socialsolidarity and collective consciencewere key terms for Emile Durkheim. Inthe Post-World War II period sociologywas greatly influenced by the structuralfunctionalists who found society

essentially harmonious. They found ituseful to compare society to anorganism where different parts have afunction to play for the maintenance ofthe whole. Others, in particular theconflict theorists influenced by Marxismsaw society as essentially conflictridden.

Within sociology some tried tounderstand human behaviour bystarting with the individual, i.e. microinteraction. Others began with macrostructures such as class, caste, market,state or even community. Conceptssuch as status and role begin with theindividual. Concepts such as socialcontrol or stratification begin from alarger context within which individualsare already placed.

The important point is that theseclassifications and types that wediscuss in sociology help us and are thetools through which we canunderstand reality. They are keys toopen locks to understand society. Theyare entry points in our understanding,not the final answer. But what if the keybecomes rusted or bent or does not fitthe lock, or fits in with effort? In suchsituations we need to change or modifythe key. In sociology we both use andalso constantly interrogate or questionthe concepts and categories.

Very often there is considerableunease about the coexistence ofdifferent kinds of definitions or conceptsor even just different views about thesame social entity. For example conflicttheory versus the functionalist theory.This multiplicity of approaches isparticularly acute in sociology. And it


II

SOCIAL GROUPS AND SOCIETY

Sociology is the study of human sociallife. A defining feature of human life isthat humans interact, communicateand construct social collectivities. Thecomparative and historical perspectiveof sociology brings home two appa-rently innocuous facts. The first that inevery society whether ancient or feudalor modern, Asian or European orAfrican human groups and collectivitiesexist. The second that the types ofgroups and collectivities are different indifferent societies.

Any gathering of people does notnecessarily constitute a social group.Aggregates are simply collections ofpeople who are in the same place at thesame time, but share no definiteconnection with one another.Passengers waiting at a railway stationor airport or bus stop or a cinemaaudience are examples of aggregates.Such aggregates are often termed asquasi groups.

What kind of groups are these?

cannot but be otherwise. For societyitself is diverse.

In our discussion on the variousterms you will notice how there isdivergence of views. And how this verydebate and discussion of differenceshelps us understand society.

Activity 1

Choose any one of the followingtopics for class discussion :

´ democracy is a help or hind-rance to development

´ gender equality makes for amore harmonious or moredivisive society

´ punishments or greater dis-cussion are the best way toresolve conflicts.

Think of other topics.

What kind of differences emerged?Do they reflect different visions ofwhat a good society ought to be like?Do they reflect different notions ofthe human being?


A quasi group is an aggregate orcombination, which lacks structure ororganisation, and whose membersmay be unaware, or less aware, of theexistence of groupings. Social classes,status groups, age and gender groups,crowds can be seen as examples ofquasi groups. As these examplessuggest quasi groups may wellbecome social groups in time and inspecific circumstances. For example,individuals belonging to a particularsocial class or caste or community maynot be organised as a collective body.They may be yet to be infused with asense of “we” feeling. But class andcaste have over a period of time givenrise to political parties. Likewisepeople of different communities inIndia have over the long anti-colonialstruggle developed an identity as acollectivity and group — a nation witha shared past and a common future.The women’s movement brought aboutthe idea of women’s groups andorganisation. All these examples draw

attention to how social groups emerge,change and get modified.

A social group can be said to haveat least the following characteristics :

(i) persistent interaction to providecontinuity;

(ii) a stable pattern of these inter-actions;

(iii) a sense of belonging to identifywith other members, i.e. eachindividual is conscious of thegroup itself and its own set ofrules, rituals and symbols;

(iv) shared interest;(v) acceptance of common norms and

values;(vi) a definable structure.

Social structure here refers topatterns of regular and repetitiveinteraction between individuals orgroups. A social group thus refers to acollection of continuously interactingpersons who share common interest,culture, values and norms within agiven society.

Activity 2

Find out a name that is relevant under each heading.

Caste An anti caste movement A caste based political party

Class A class based movement A class based political party

Women A women’s movement A women’s organisation

Tribe A tribal movement A tribe/tribes based political partyVillagers An environmental movement An environmental organisation

Discuss whether they were all social groups to start with and if some were not,then at what point can one apply the term social group to them, using the termas sociologically understood.


TYPES OF GROUPS

As you read through this section ongroups you will find that differentsociologists and social anthropologistshave categorised groups into differenttypes. What you will be struck withhowever is that there is a pattern in thetypology. In most cases they contrastthe manner in which people formgroups in traditional and small scalesocieties to that of modern and largescale societies. As mentioned earlier,they were struck by the differencebetween close, intimate, face-to-faceinteraction in traditional societies andimpersonal, detached, distantinteraction in modern societies.

However a complete contrast isprobably not an accurate descriptionof reality.

Primary and SecondarySocial Groups

The groups to which we belong are notall of equal importance to us. Somegroups tend to influence many aspectsof our lives and bring us into personalassociation with others. The termprimary group is used to refer to asmall group of people connected byintimate and face-to-face associationand co-operation. The members ofprimary groups have a sense ofbelonging. Family, village and groups

Contrast the two types of group

Activity 3

Discuss the age group of teenagers. Is it a quasi group or social group? Wereideas about ‘teenage’ and ‘teenagers’ as a special phase in life always there? Intraditional societies how was the entry of children into adulthood marked? Incontemporary times do marketing strategies and advertisement have anythingto do with the strengthening or weakening of this group/quasi group? Identifyan advertisement that targets teenagers or pre-teens. Read the section onstratification and discuss how teenage may mean very different life experiencesfor the poor and rich, for the upper and lower class, for the discriminated andprivileged caste.


of friends are examples of primarygroups.

Secondary groups are relativelylarge in size, maintain formal andimpersonal relationships. The primarygroups are person-oriented, whereasthe secondary groups are goal oriented.Schools, government offices, hospitals,students’ associations etc. are examplesof secondary groups.

Community and Societyor Association

The idea of comparing and contrastingthe old traditional and agrarian way oflife with the new modern and urban onein terms of their different andcontrasting social relationships andlifestyles, dates back to the writings ofclassical sociologists.

The term ‘community’ refers tohuman relationships that are highlypersonal, intimate and enduring, thosewhere a person’s involvement isconsiderable if not total, as in thefamily, with real friends or a close-knitgroup.

‘Society’ or ‘association’ refers toeverything opposite of ‘community’, inparticular the apparently impersonal,superficial and transitory relationshipsof modern urban life. Commerce andindustry require a more calculating,rational and self-interesting approachto one’s dealings with others. We makecontracts or agreements rather thangetting to know one another. You maydraw a parallel between the communitywith the primary group and theassociation with the secondary group.

In-Groups and Out-Groups

A sense of belonging marks an in-group. This feeling separates ‘us’ or ‘we’from ‘them’ or ‘they’. Childrenbelonging to a particular school mayform an ‘in-group’ as against those whodo not belong to the school. Can youthink of other such groups?

An out-group on the other hand isone to which the members of an in-group do not belong. The members ofan out-group can face hostile reactionsfrom the members of the in-group.Migrants are often considered as anout-group. However, even here the

Activity 4

Collect a copy of a memorandum of

any association that you know of orcan find out about for example aResident Welfare Association, a

women’s association (MahilaSamiti), a Sports Club. You will findclear information about its goals,

objectives, membership and otherrules that govern it. Contrast thiswith a large family gathering.

You may find that many a time

that interaction among members ofa formal group over time becomescloses and ‘just like family and

friends.’ This brings home the pointthat concepts are not fixed andfrozen entities. They are indeed

keys or tools for understanding so-ciety and its changes.


actual definition of who belongs andwho does not, changes with time andsocial contexts.

The well known sociologistM.N. Srinivas observed while he wascarrying out a census in Rampura in1948 how distinctions were madebetween recent and later migrants.He writes:

I heard villagers use two expressionswhich I came to realise were significant:the recent immigrants were almostcontemptuously described as nennemonne bandavartu (‘came yesterday orthe day before’) while old immigrantswere described as arsheyindabandavaru (‘came long ago’) orkhadeem kulagalu (‘old lineages’),(Srinivas 1996:33).

but we do identify ourselves withthat group. Reference groups areimportant sources of informationabout culture, lifestyle, aspirationand goal attainments.

In the colonial period many middleclass Indians aspired to behave likeproper Englishman. In that sense theycould be seen as a reference group forthe aspiring section. But this processwas gendered, i.e. it had differentimplications for men and women. OftenIndian men wanted to dress and dinelike the British men but wanted theIndian women to remain ‘Indian’ intheir ways. Or aspire to be a bit like theproper English woman but also notquite like her. Do you still find this validtoday?

Peer Groups

This is a kind of primary group,usually formed between individualswho are either of similar age or who arein a common professional group. Peerpressure refers to the social pressureexerted by one’s peers on what oneought to do or not.

Reference Group

For any group of people there arealways other groups whom they lookup to and aspire to be like. Thegroups whose lifestyles are emulatedare known as reference groups. We donot belong to our reference groups

Activity 5

Find out about the experience ofimmigrants in other countries. Ormay be even from different parts of

our own country.You will find that relationships

between groups change and modify.

People once considered members ofan out-group become in-groupmembers. Can you find out about

such processes in history?Activity 6

Do your friends or others of your

age group influence you? Are youconcerned with their approval ordisapproval about the way you

dress, behave, the kind of musicyou like to listen to or the kind offilms you prefer? Do you considerit to be social pressure? Discuss.


SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

Social stratification refers to theexistence of structured inequalitiesbetween groups in society, in terms oftheir access to material or symbolicrewards. Thus stratification can mostsimply be defined as structuralinequalities between differentgroupings of people. Often socialstratification is compared to thegeological layering of rock in the earth’ssurface. Society can be seen asconsisting of ‘strata’ in a hierarchy, withthe more favoured at the top and theless privileged near the bottom.

Inequality of power and advantageis central for sociology, because of thecrucial place of stratification in theorganisation of society. Every aspect ofthe life of every individual andhousehold is affected by stratification.Opportunities for health, longevity,security, educational success, fulfillmentin work and political influence are allunequally distributed in systematic ways.

Historically four basic systems ofstratification have existed in humansocieties: slavery, caste, estate andclass. Slavery is an extreme form ofinequality in which some individualsare literally owned by others. It hasexisted sporadically at many times andplaces, but there are two majorexamples of a system of slavery; ancientGreece and Rome and the SouthernStates of the USA in the 18th and 19thcenturies. As a formal institution,slavery has gradually been eradicated.But we do continue to have bondedlabour, often even of children. Estatescharacterised feudal Europe. We do not

enter into details about estates here butvery briefly touch upon caste and classas systems of social stratification. Weshall be dealing in greater detail withclass, caste, gender as bases of socialstratification in the book, Under-standing Society (NCERT, 2006).

Caste

In a caste stratification system anindividual’s position totally depends onthe status attributes ascribed by birthrather than on any which are achievedduring the course of one’s life. This isnot to say that in a class society thereis no systematic constraint onachievement imposed by statusattributes such as race and gender.However, status attributes ascribed bybirth in a caste society define anindividual’s position more completelythan they do in class society.

In traditional India different castesformed a hierarchy of social precedence.Each position in the caste structure wasdefined in terms of its purity orpollution relative to others. Theunderlying belief was that those whoare most pure, the Brahmin priestlycastes, are superior to all others andthe Panchamas, sometimes called the‘outcastes’ are inferior to all othercastes. The traditional system isgenerally conceptualised in terms of thefour fold varna of Brahmins, Kshatriyas,Vaishyas and Shudras. In reality there areinnumerable occupation-based castegroups, called jatis.

The caste system in India hasundergone considerable changes overthe years. Endogamy and ritual


avoidance of contact with members ofso-called lower castes were consideredcritical for maintaining purity by the so-called upper castes. Changes broughtin by urbanisation inevitablychallenged this. Read well knownsociologist A.R. Desai’s observationsbelow.

Other social consequences ofurbanisation in India are commentedupon by sociologist A.R. Desai as:

Modern industries brought intobeing modern cities honey-combed with cosmopolitan hotels,restaurants, theatres, trams,buses, railways. The modest hotelsand restaurants catered for theworkers and middle classes becamecrowded in cities with personsbelonging to all castes and evencreeds... In trains and buses oneoccasionally rubbed shoulders withmembers of the depressed classes...should not, however be supposedthat caste had vanished (Desai1975:248).

While change did take place,discrimination was not so easy to doaway with, as a first person narrativesuggests.

In the mill there may be no opendiscrimination of the kind that existsin the villages, but experience of privateinteractions tells another story. Parmarobserved…

They will not even drink water fromour hands and they sometimes useabusive language when dealing

with us. This is because they feeland believe they are superior. It hasbeen like that for years. No matterhow well we dress they are notprepared to accept certain things(Franco et. al. 2004:150).

Even today acute castediscrimination exists. At the same timethe working of democracy has affectedthe caste system. Castes as interestgroups have gained strength. We havealso seen discriminated castes assertingtheir democratic rights in society.

Class

There have been many attempts toexplain class. We mention here, verybriefly just the central ideas of Marx,Weber and that of, functionalism. Inthe Marxist theory social classes aredefined by what relation they have tothe means of production. Questionscould be asked as to whether groupsare owners of means of production suchas land or factories? Or whether theyare owners of nothing but their ownlabour? Weber used the term life-chances, which refers to the rewardsand advantages afforded by marketcapacity. Inequality, Weber arguedmight be based on economic relations.But it could also be based on prestigeor on political power.

The functionalist theory of socialstratification begins from the generalpresupposition or belief of function-alism that no society is “classless” orunstratified. The main functionalnecessity explains the universalpresence of social stratification in


requirements faced by a societyof placing and motivating individualsin the social structure. Socialinequality or stratification is thus anunconsciously evolved device by whichsocieties ensure that the mostimportant positions are deliberatelyfilled by the most qualified persons. Isthis true?

In a traditional caste system socialhierarchy is fixed, rigid and transmittedacross generations. Modern classsystem in contrast is open andachievement-based. In democraticsocieties there is nothing to legally stopa person from the most deprived classand caste from reaching the highestposition.

Tribes population lives below thepoverty line. This proportion is onlyslightly less for the Scheduled Castesat about 43 per cent, and lesser still forthe Other Backward Classes at about34 per cent (Deshpande 2003:114).

Status and Role

The two concepts ‘status’ and ‘role’ areoften seen as twin concepts. A status issimply a position in society or in agroup. Every society and every grouphas many such positions and everyindividual occupies many suchpositions.

Status thus refers to the socialposition with defined rights and dutiesassigned to these positions. Toillustrate, mother occupies a status,which has many norms of conduct aswell as certain responsibilities andprerogatives.

A role is the dynamic or thebehavioural aspect of status. Status isoccupied, but roles are played. We maysay that a status is an institutionalisedrole. It is a role that has becomeregularised, standardised and forma-lised in the society at large or in any ofthe specific associations of society.

It must be apparent that eachindividual in a modern complex societysuch as ours occupies many differentkinds of status during the course ofhis/her life. You as a school studentmay be a student to your teacher, acustomer to your grocer, a passengerto the bus driver, a brother or sister toyour sibling and a patient to the doctor.Needless to say, we could keep addingto the list. The smaller and simpler the

Such stories of achievement do existand are sources of immense inspiration.Yet for the most part the structure ofthe class system persists. Sociologicalstudies of social mobility, even inwestern societies are far removed fromthe ideal model of perfect mobility.Sociology has to be sensitive to both thechallenges to the caste system as wellas the persistence of discrimination.Significantly those, at the lower levelsof the system, are not just disadvantagedsocially but also economically. In ruralIndia, more than half of the Scheduled

Activity 7

Find out more about the life ofthe late President K. R. Narayanan.

Discuss the concept of ascriptionand achieved status, caste andclass in this context.


society, the fewer the kinds of statusthat an individual can have.

In a modern society an individualas we saw occupies multiple statuswhich is sociologically termed as statusset. Individuals acquire different statusat various stages of life. A son becomesa father, a grandfather, and then greatgrandfather and so on. This is called astatus sequence for it refers to thestatus, which is attained in successionor sequence at various stages of life.

An ascribed status is a socialposition, which a person occupiesbecause of birth, or assumesinvoluntarily. The most common basesfor ascribed status are age, caste, raceand kinship. Simple and traditionalsocieties are marked by ascribed status.An achieved status on the other handrefers to a social position that a personoccupies voluntarily by personalability, achievements, virtues andchoices. The most common bases forachieved status are educationalqualifications, income, and professionalexpertise. Modern societies arecharacterised by achievements. Itsmembers are accorded prestige on thebasis of their achievements. How oftenyou would have heard the phrase “youhave to prove yourself”. In traditionalsocieties your status was defined andascribed at birth. However, asdiscussed above, even in modernachievement-based societies, ascribedstatus matters.

Status and prestige areinterconnected terms. Every status isaccorded certain rights and values.Values are attached to the socialposition, rather than to the person who

occupies it or to his/her performanceor to his/her actions. The kind ofvalue attached to the status or to theoffice is called prestige. People canrank status in terms of their high orlow prestige. The prestige of a doctormay be high in comparison to ashopkeeper, even if the doctor mayearn less. It is important to keep inmind that ideas of what occupation isconsidered prestigious varies acrosssocieties and across periods.

People perform their roles accordingto social expectations, i.e. role takingand role playing. A child learns tobehave in accordance with how herbehaviour will be seen and judged byothers.

Role conflict is the incompatibilityamong roles corresponding to one ormore status. It occurs when contraryexpectations arise from two or moreroles. A common example is that of the

Activity 8

What kinds of jobs are consideredprestigious in your society?

Compare these with your friends.Discuss the similarities anddifferences. Try and understand the

causes for the same.

Activity 9

Find out how a domestic worker ora construction labourer faces roleconflict.


middle class working woman who hasto juggle her role as mother and wifeat home and that of a professional atwork.

It is a common place assumptionthat men do not face role conflict.Sociology being both an empirical andcomparative discipline suggestsotherwise.

Khasi matriliny generates intenserole conflict for men. They are tornbetween their responsibilities totheir natal house on the one handand to their wife and children onthe other. They feel deprived ofsufficient authority to commandtheir children’s loyalty and lack thefreedom to pass on after death, eventheir self-acquired property to theirchildren…The strain affects Khasi women, ina way more intensely. A woman cannever be fully assured that herhusband does not find his sister’shouse more congenial place thanher own house (Nongbri 2003:190).

Role stereotyping is a process ofreinforcing some specific role for somemember of the society. For examplemen and women are often socialised instereotypical roles, as breadwinner andhomemaker respectively. Social rolesand status are often wrongly seen asfixed and unchanging. It is felt thatindividuals learn the expectations thatsurround social positions in theirparticular culture and perform theseroles largely as they have been defined.Through socialisation, individualsinternalise social roles and learn howto carry them out. This view, however,

is mistaken. It suggests thatindividuals simply take on roles, ratherthan creating or negotiating them. Infact, socialisation is a process in whichhumans can exercise agency; they arenot simply passive subjects waiting tobe instructed or programmed.Individuals come to understand andassume social roles through an ongoingprocess of social interaction. Thisdiscussion perhaps will make youreflect upon the relationship betweenthe individual and society, which wehad studied in Chapter 1.

Roles and status are not given andfixed. People make efforts to fightagainst discrimination roles and statusfor example those based on caste orrace or gender. At the same time thereare sections in society who oppose suchchanges. Likewise individual violationof roles are often punished. Society thusfunctions not just with roles and statusbut also with social control.

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CONTROL

Social control is one of the mostgenerally used concepts in sociology.It refers to the various means used bya society to bring its recalcitrant orunruly members back into line.

Activity 10

Collect newspaper reports wheredominant sections of society seek toimpose control and punish thosewhom they consider to have

transgressed or violated sociallyprescribed roles.


You will recall how sociology hasdifferent perspectives and debatesabout the meaning of concepts. Youwill also recall how functionalistsociologists understood society asessentially harmonious and conflicttheorists saw society as essentiallyunequal, unjust and exploitative. Wealso saw how some sociologistsfocussed more on the individual andsociety, others on collectivities likeclasses, races and castes.

For a functionalist perspective socialcontrol refers to: (i) the use of force toregulate the behaviour of the individualand groups and also refers to the(ii) enforcing of values and patterns formaintaining order in society. Socialcontrol here is directed to restraindeviant behaviour of individuals or

groups on the one hand, and on theother, to mitigate tensions and conflictsamong individuals and groups tomaintain social order and socialcohesion. In this way social control isseen as necessary to stability in society.

Conflict theorists usually would seesocial control more as a mechanism toimpose the social control of dominantsocial classes on the rest of society.Stability would be seen as the writ ofone section over the other. Likewise, lawwould be seen as the formal writ of thepowerful and their interests on society.

Social control refers to the socialprocess, techniques and strategies bywhich behaviours of individual or agroup are regulated. It refers both tothe use of force to regulate thebehaviour of the individual and groups

The ultimate and, no doubt, the oldest means of social control is physicalviolence... even in the politely operated societies of modern democracies theultimate argument is violence. No state can exist without a police force or itsequivalent in armed might... In any functioning society violence is usedeconomically and as a last resort, with the mere threat of this ultimate violencesufficing for the day-to-day exercise of social control... Where human beings liveor work in compact groups, in which they are personally known and to whichthey are tied by feelings of personal loyalty (the kind that sociologists call primarygroups), very potent and simultaneously very subtle mechanisms of control areconstantly brought to bear upon the actual or potent deviant... One aspect ofsocial control that ought to be stressed is the fact that it is frequently based onfraudulent claims... A little boy can exercise considerable control over his peergroup by having a big brother who, if need be, can be called upon to beat up anyopponents. In the absence of such a brother, however it is possible to inventone. It will then be a question of the public-relations talents of the little boy as towhether he will succeed in translating his invention into actual control (Berger84-90).

Have you ever seen or heard a young child threaten another with “ I will tellmy elder brother.”

Can you think of other examples?


and also refers to the enforcing of valuesand patterns for maintaining order insociety.

Social control may be informal orformal. When the codified, systematic,and other formal mechanism of controlis used, it is known as formal socialcontrol. There are agencies andmechanism of formal social control, forexample, law and the state. In a modernsociety formal mechanisms andagencies of social control areemphasised.

In every society there is another typeof social control that is known asinformal social control. It is personal,unofficial and uncodified. They includesmiles, making faces, body language,frowns, criticism, ridicule, laughter etc.There can be great variations in theiruse within the same society. In day-to-day life they are quite effective.

However, in some cases informalmethods of social control may not beadequate in enforcing conformity orobedience. There are various agenciesof informal social control e.g. family,religion, kinship, etc. Have you heardabout honour killing? Read the

newspaper report which is given belowand identify the different agencies ofsocial control involved.

A sanction is a mode of reward orpunishment that reinforces sociallyexpected forms of behaviour. Socialcontrol can be positive or negative.Members of societies can be rewardedfor good and expected behaviour. Onthe other hand, negative sanctions arealso used to enforce rules and torestrain deviance.

Deviance refers to modes of action,which do not conform to the norms or

Activity 11

Can you think of examples drawnfrom your life how this ‘unofficial’

social control operates? Have you inclass or in your peer group noticedhow a child who behaves a bit

differently from the rest is treated?Have you witnessed incidents wherechildren are bullied by their peergroup to be more like the other

children?

Man kills sister for marrying from outside the caste

... The elder brother of a 19-year-old girl here carried out an apparent ‘honourkilling’ by allegedly beheading her while she was asleep at a hospital ... police

said on Monday.The girl... was undergoing treatment at ... Hospital for stab wounds after her

brother... attacked her on December 16 for marrying outside the caste, they

said. She and her lover eloped on December 10 and returned to their houseshere on December 16 after getting married, which was opposed by her parents,they said. The Panchayat also tried to pressurise the couple but they refused to be swayed.


values held by most of the members ofa group or society. What is regarded as‘deviant’ is as widely variable as thenorms and values that distinguishdifferent cultures and subcultures.Likewise ideas of deviance arechallenged and change from one periodto another. For example, a womanchoosing to become an astronaut may

be considered deviant at one time, andbe applauded at another time even inthe same society. You are alreadyfamiliar with how sociology is differentfrom common sense. The specificterms and concepts discussed in thischapter will help you further to movetowards a sociological understandingof society.

GLOSSARY

Conflict Theories : A sociological perspective that focuses on the tensions,divisions and competing interests present in human societies. Conflicttheorists believe that the scarcity and value of resources in society producesconflict as groups struggle to gain access to and control those resources.Many conflict theorists have been strongly influenced by the writings ofMarx.

Functionalism : A theoretical perspective based on the notion that socialevents can best be explained in terms of the function they perform — that isthe contribution they make to the continuity of a society. And on a view ofsociety as a complex system whose various parts work in relationship toeach other in a way that needs to be understood.

Identity : The distinctive characteristic of a person’s character or thecharacter of a group which relate to who they are and what is meaningful tothem. Some of the main sources of identity include gender, nationality orethnicity, social class.

Means of Production : The means whereby the production of material goodsis carried on in a society, including not just technology but the socialrelations between producers.

Microsociology and Macrosociology : The study of everyday behaviour insituations of face-to-face interaction is usually called microsociology. Inmicrosociology, analysis occurs at the level of individuals or small groups. Itdiffers from macrosociology, which concerns itself with large-scale socialsystems, like the political system or the economic order. Though they appearto be distinct, they are closely connected.

Natal : It relates to the place or time of one’s birth. R

Norms : Rules of behaviour which reflect or embody a culture’s values, eitherprescribing a given type of behaviour, or forbidding it. Norms are always


backed by sanctions of one kind or another, varying from informal disapprovalto physical punishment or execution.

Sanctions : A mode of reward or punishment that reinforce socially expectedforms of behaviour.

EXERCISES

1. Why do we need to use special terms and concepts in sociology?

2. As a member of society you must be interacting with and in differentgroups. How do you see these groups from a sociological perspective?

3. What have you observed about the stratification system existing in yoursociety? How are individual lives affected by stratification?

4. What is social control? Do you think the modes of social control in differentspheres of society are different? Discuss.

5. Identify the different roles and status that you play and are located in.Do you think roles and status change? Discuss when and how theychange.

READINGS

BERGER, L. PETER. 1976. Invitation to Sociology : A Humanistic Perspective.Penguin, Harmondsworth.

BOTTOMORE, TOM. and ROBERT, NISBET. 1978. A History of Sociological Analysis.Basic Books, New York.

BOTTOMORE, TOM. 1972. Sociology . Vintage Books, New York.

DESHPANDE, SATISH. 2003. Contemporary India : A Sociological View. Viking, Delhi.

FERNANDO, FRANCO. MACWAN, JYOTSNA. and RAMANATHAN, SUGUNA. 2004. Journeysto Freedom Dalit Narratives. Samya, Kolkata.

GIDDENS, ANTHONY. 2001. Sociology. Fourth Edition, Polity Press, Cambridge.

JAYARAM, N. 1987. Introductory Sociology. Macmillan India Ltd, Delhi.

NONGBRI, TIPLUT. 2003. ‘Gender and the Khasi Family Structure : The MeghalayaSuccession to Self-Acquired Property Act,1984’, in ed. REGE, SHARMILA.Sociology of Gender The Challenge of Feminist Sociological Knowledge. SagePublications, New Delhi, pp.182-194.

SRINIVAS, M.N. 1996. Village, Caste, Gender and Method. Oxford UniversityPress, New Delhi.


CHAPTER 3

UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

I

INTRODUCTION

This book began with a discussionabout the interaction of the individualand society. We saw that each of us asindividuals, occupies a place orlocation in society. Each one of us hasa status and a role or roles, but theseare not simply what we as individualschoose. They are not like roles a filmactor may or may not opt to do. Thereare social institutions that constrain andcontrol, punish and reward. They couldbe ‘macro’ social institutions like thestate or ‘micro’ ones like the family.Here in this chapter we are introducedto social institutions, and also to howsociology/social anthropology studiesthem. This chapter puts forth a verybrief idea of some of the central areaswhere important social institutions arelocated namely: (i) family, marriage andkinship; (ii) politics; (iii) economics;(iv) religion; and (v) education.

In the broadest sense, aninstitution is something that worksaccording to rules established or at

least acknowledged by law or bycustom. And whose regular andcontinuous operation cannot beunderstood without taking those rulesinto account. Institutions imposeconstraints on individuals. They alsoprovide him/her with opportunities.

An institution can also be viewed asan end in itself. Indeed people haveviewed family, religion, state or eveneducation as an end in itself.

We have already seen that thereare conflicting and differentunderstandings of concepts withinsociology. We have also been introducedto the functionalist and conflictperspective, and seen how differentlythey saw the same thing, for instance,stratification or social control. Notsurprisingly, therefore, there aredifferent forms of understanding ofsocial institutions as well.

Activity 1

Think of examples of how people

sacrifice for family, for religion or forthe state.

41UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

A functionalist view understandssocial institutions as a complex set ofsocial norms, beliefs, values and rolerelationship that arise in response tothe needs of society. Social institutionsexist to satisfy social needs. Accordinglywe find informal and formal socialinstitutions in societies. Institutionssuch as family and religion areexamples of informal social institutionswhile law and (formal) education areformal social institutions.

A conflict view holds that allindividuals are not placed equally insociety. All social institutions whetherfamilial, religious, political, economic,legal or educational will operate in theinterest of the dominant sections ofsociety be it class, caste, tribe or gender.The dominant social section not onlydominates political and economicinstitutions but also ensures that theruling class ideas become the rulingideas of a society. This is very differentfrom the idea that there are generalneeds of a society.

As you go about reading thischapter, see whether you can thinkof examples to show how socialinstitutions constrain and also offeropportunities to individuals. Noticewhether they impact different sectionsof society unequally. For instance, wecould ask, “How does the familyconstrain as well provide opportunitiesto men and women?” Or “How dopolitical or legal institutions affect theprivileged and dispossessed?”

II

FAMILY, MARRIAGE AND KINSHIP

Perhaps no other social entity appearsmore ‘natural’ than the family. Often weare prone to assume that all families arelike the ones we live in. No other socialinstitution appears more universal andunchanging. Sociology and socialanthropology have over many decades,conducted field research acrosscultures to show how the institutionsof family, marriage and kinship areimportant in all societies and yet theircharacter is different in differentsocieties. They have also shown how thefamily (the private sphere) is linked toeconomic, political, cultural andeducational (the public) spheres. Thismay remind you of why there is a needto share and borrow from differentdisciplines, which we have discussed inChapter 1.

According to the functionalists thefamily performs important tasks, whichcontribute to society’s basic needs andhelps perpetuate social order. Thefunctionalist perspective argues thatmodern industrial societies functionbest if women look after the family andmen earn the family livelihood. In Indiastudies however suggest that familiesneed not become nuclear in anindustrial pattern of economy (Singh1993: 83). This is but one example toshow how trends based on experiencesof one society cannot necessarily begeneralised.

The nuclear family is seen as theunit best equipped to handle thedemands of industrial society by the


functionalists. In such a family oneadult can work outside home while thesecond adult cares for the home andchildren. In practical terms, thisspecialisation of roles within thenuclear family involves the husbandadopting the ‘instrumental’ role asbreadwinner, and the wife assumingthe ‘affective’, emotional role in domesticsettings (Giddens 2001). This vision isquestionable not just because it isgender unjust but because empiricalstudies across cultures and historyshow that it is untrue. Indeed, as youwill see in the discussion on work andeconomy how in contemporaryindustries like the garment export,women form a large part of the labourforce. Such a separation also suggeststhat men are necessarily the heads ofhouseholds. This is not necessarily trueas the box which is given below shows.

Variation in Family Forms

A central debate in India has beenabout the shift from nuclear family tojoint families. We have already seen howsociology questions common senseimpressions. The fact is that nuclear

families have always existed in Indiaparticularly among deprived castes andclasses.

The sociologist A.M. Shah remarksthat in post-independent India the jointfamily has steadily increased. Thecontributing factor is the increasing lifeexpectancy in India according to him. Ithas increased from 32.5 – 55.4 yearsfor men and from 31.7– 55.7 years forwomen during the period 1941– 50to 1981 - 85. Consequently, theproportion of aged people (60 years andabove) in the total population hasincreased. “We have to ask” writes Shah:

“in what kind of household do theseelderly people live? I submit, mostof them live in joint household”(Shah 1998).

This again is a broad generalisation.But in the spirit of the sociologicalperspective, it cautions us againstblindly believing a common senseimpression that the joint family is fasteroding. And alerts us to the need forcareful comparative and empiricalstudies.

Studies have shown how diversefamily forms are found in different

Female headed households

When men migrate to urban areas, women have to plough and manage theagricultural fields. Many a time they become the sole providers of their families.Such households are known as female headed households. Widowhood too

might create such familial arrangement. Or it may happen when men getremarried and stop sending remittance to their wives, children and otherdependents. In such a situation, women have to ensure the maintenance of thefamily. Among the Kolams, a tribal community in south-eastern Maharashtra

and northern Andhra Pradesh, a female headed household is an accepted norm.


societies. With regard to the rule ofresidence, some societies are matrilocalin their marriage and family customswhile others are patrilocal. In the firstcase, the newly married couple stayswith the woman’s parents, whereas inthe second case the couple lives withthe man’s parents. A patriarchal familystructure exists where the menexercise authority and dominance, andmatriarchy where the women play amajor role in decision-making in thefamily. While matrilineal societies exist,the same cannot be claimed aboutmatriarchal societies.

Families are Linked to other SocialSpheres and Families Change

Often in our everyday life we look atthe family as distinct and separate fromother spheres such as the economic orpolitical. However, as you will see foryourself the family, the household, itsstructure and norms are closely linkedto the rest of society. An interestingexample is that of the unintendedconsequences of the German uni-fication. During the post-unificationperiod in the 1990s Germanywitnessed a rapid decline in marriage

Notice how families and residences are different

Work and Home


because the new German statewithdrew all the protection and welfareschemes which were provided to thefamilies prior to the unification. Withgrowing sense of economic insecuritypeople responded by refusing to marry.This can also be understood as acase of unintended consequence(Chapter 1).

Family and kinship are thussubject to change and transformationdue to macro economic processes butthe direction of change need not alwaysbe similar for all countries and regions.Moreover, change does not mean thecomplete erosion of previous norms andstructure. Change and continuityco-exist.

How gendered is the family?

The belief is that the male child willsupport the parents in the old age and

the female child will leave on marriageresults in families investing more in amale child. Despite the biological factthat a female baby has better chancesof survival than a male baby the rate ofinfant mortality among female childrenis higher in comparison to malechildren in lower age group in India.

The Institution of Marriage

Historically marriage has been foundto exist in a wide variety of forms in

Sex Ratio in India between 1901-2001

Year Sex Ratio Year Sex Ratio

1901 972 1951 946

1911 964 1961 941

1921 955 1971 930

1931 950 1981 934

1941 945 1991 926

2001 (927)*

* In 2001 the sex ratio of girls in 0-6 group was enumerated as 927

Activity 2

A Telegu expression states:

‘Bringing up a daughter is likewatering a plant in another’scourtyard’. Find out other such

sayings that are contrary. Discusshow popular sayings reflect thesocial arrangement of a society,

The incidence of female foeticide has led to a sudden decline in the sex ratio. The child sex ratio has declined from 934 per thousand males in 1991 to 927 in

2001. The percentage of decline in the child sex ratio is more alarming. Thesituation of prosperous states like Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra and westernUtter Pradesh is all the more grave. In Punjab the child sex ratio has declined

to 793 girls per 1,000 boys. In some of the districts of Punjab and Haryana ithas fallen below 700.


different societies. It has also beenfound to perform differing functions.Indeed, the manner in which marriagepartners are arranged reveals anastonishing variety of modes andcustoms.

right for upper caste Hindu widowswas denied and that the campaign forwidow remarriage was a major issuein the 19th century reform movements.What you are probably less aware isthat today in modern India nearly 10per cent of all women and 55 per centof women over fifty years are widows(Chen 2000:353).

Polygamy denotes marriage tomore than one mate at one time andtakes the form of either: Polygyny (onehusband with two or more wives) orPolyandry (one wife with two or morehusbands). Usually where economicconditions are harsh, polyandry maybe one response of society, since insuch situations a single male cannotadequately support a wife andchildren. Also, extreme povertyconditions pressurise a group to limitits population.

The Matter of Arranging Marriages:Rules and Prescriptions

In some societies, the decisionsregarding mate selection are madeby parents/relatives; in some othersocieties individuals are relatively freeto choose their own mates.

Rules of Endogamy and Exogamy

In some societies these restrictionsare subtle, while in some others,individuals who can or cannot bemarried, are more explicitly andspecifically defined. Forms of marriagebased on rules governing eligibility/ineligibility of mates is classified asendogamy and exogamy.

Forms of Marriage

Marriage has a large variety of forms.These forms can be identified on thebasis of the number of partners andrules governing who can marry whom.In terms of the number of partners thatcan legitimately enter into matrimony,we have two forms of marriage,namely, monogamy and polygamy.Monogamy restricts the individual toone spouse at a time. Under thissystem, at any given time a man canhave only one wife and a woman canhave only one husband. Even wherepolygamy is permitted, in actualpractice, monogamy is more widelyprevalent.

In many societies, individuals arepermitted to marry again, often on thedeath of the first spouse or afterdivorce. But they cannot have morethan one spouse at one and the sametime. Such monogamous marriagesare termed serial monogamy.Remarriages on the death of a wife havebeen a norm for men for the most part.But as all of you are aware that the

Activiy 3

Find out about the different ways

that different societies go aboutfinding marriage partners.


Activity 4

Collect different wedding songs and

discuss how they reflect the socialdynamics of marriages and ofgender relations.

Activity 5

Have you ever seen matrimonial

advertisements? Divide your classinto groups and look at different

newspapers, magazines and theinternet. Discuss your findings. Do

you think endogamy is still theprevalent norm? How does it help

you to understand choice inmarriage? More importantly, what

kind of changes in society does itreflect?

Endogamy requires an individualto marry within a culturally definedgroup of which he or she is already amember, as for example, caste.Exogamy, the reverse of endogamy,requires the individual to marry outsideof his/her own group. Endogamy andexogamy are in reference to certainkinship units, such as, clan, caste andracial, ethnic or religious groupings. InIndia, village exogamy is practised incertain parts of north India. Villageexogamy ensured that daughters weremarried into families from villages faraway from home. This arrangementensured smooth transition andadjustment of the bride into the affinalhome without interference of herkinsmen. The geographical distanceplus the unequal relationship in thepatrilineal system ensured that marrieddaughters did not get to see theirparents too often. Thus parting fromnatal home was a sad occasion and isthe theme of folk songs, which depictthe pain of departure.

Father, we are like flocks of birdWe shall fly away; Our flight will belong,We know not to which,Region we will go.Father, my palanquin cannotPass through your palace,(because the door is too small)Daughter, I shall remove a brick(to enlarge the passage for yourpalanquin),You must go to your home.

(Chanana 1993:WS26)

Rock-a-bye-baby, combs in yourpretty hair,The bridegroom will come soon andtake you awayThe drums beat loudly, the shehnaiis playing softlyA stranger’s son has come to fetch meCome my playmates, come with ourtoysLet us play, for I shall never playagainWhen I go off to the strangers’ house.

(Dube 2001: 94)

Defining Some Basic Concepts,Particularly those of Family,Kinship and Marriage

A family is a group of personsdirectly linked by kin connections,


the adult members of which assumeresponsibility for caring for children.Kinship ties are connections betweenindividuals, established either throughmarriage or through the lines of descentthat connect blood relatives (mothers,fathers, siblings, offspring, etc.)Marriage can be defined as a sociallyacknowledged and approved sexualunion between two adult individuals.When two people marry, they becomekin to one another. The marriage bondalso, however, connects together a widerrange of people. Parents, brothers,sisters and other blood relatives becomerelatives of the partner throughmarriage. The family of birth is calledfamily of orientation and the family inwhich a person is married is called thefamily of procreation. The kin who arerelated through “blood” are calledconsanguinal kin while the kin who arerelated through marriage are calledaffines. As we move on to the nextsection on work and economicinstitutions, you will notice how thefamily and economic life are closelyinterconnected.

III

WORK AND ECONOMIC LIFE

What is Work?

As children and young students weimagine what kind of ‘work’ we will dowhen we grow up. ‘Work’ here quiteclearly refers to paid employment. Thisis the most widely understood sense of‘work’ in modern times.

This in fact is an oversimplified view.Many types of work do not conform tothe idea of paid employment. Much ofthe work done in the informal economy,for example, is not recorded in anydirect way in the official employmentstatistics. The term informal economyrefers to transactions outside thesphere of regular employment,sometimes involving the exchange ofcash for services provided, but alsooften involving the direct exchange ofgoods or services.

We can define work, whether paidor unpaid, as the carrying out of tasksrequiring the expenditure of mental and

There was no occupation, which Tiny’s Granny had not tried at some stage of

her life. From the time she was old enough to hold her own cup she had startedworking at odd jobs in people’s houses in return for her two meals a day andcast-off clothes. Exactly what the words ‘odd jobs’ mean, only those know who

have been kept at them at an age when they ought to have been laughing andplaying with other children. Anything from the uninteresting duty of shakingthe baby’s rattle to massaging the master’s head comes under the category of‘odd jobs’ (Chugtai 2004:125).

Find out more about the various kinds of ‘work’ done from your ownobservation or literature or even films. Discuss.


Types of Work

physical effort, which has as its objectivethe production of goods and servicesthat cater to human needs.

Modern Forms of Work and Divisionof Labour

In pre-modern forms of society mostpeople worked in the field or cared forthe livestock. In the industriallydeveloped society only a tiny pro-portion of the population works in

agriculture, and farming itself hasbecome industrialised — it is carried onlargely by means of machines rather

Activity 6

Find out the proportion of Indianswho are in rural based occupations.

Make a list of these occupations.


People seeking jobs in factorieswere trained to perform a specialisedtask and receive a wage for this work.Managers supervised the work, fortheir task was to enhance workerproductivity and discipline.

One of the main features of modernsocieties is an enormous expansion ofeconomic interdependence. We are alldependent on an immense number ofother workers-stretching right acrossthe world- for the products and servicesthat sustain our lives. With fewexceptions, the vast majority of peoplein modern societies do not produce thefood they eat, the houses they live in orthe material goods they consume.

than by human hand. In a country likeIndia, the larger share of the populationcontinues to be rural and agriculturalor involved in other rural basedoccupations.

There are other trends in India too,for instance an expansion of the servicesector.

One of the most distinctivecharacteristics of the economic systemof modern societies is the existence of ahighly complex division of labour. Workhas been divided into an enormousnumber of different occupations inwhich people specialise. In traditionalsocieties, non-agricultural workentailed the mastery of a craft. Craftskills were learned through a lengthyperiod of apprenticeship, and theworker normally carried out all aspectsof the production process frombeginning to end.

Activity 7

Find out whether there has been ashift to the service sector in India

in recent times. Which are thesesectors?

Activity 9

Make a list of the food that you eat,the materials that were used to make

the houses you live in, the clothesyou wear. Find out how and whomade them.

Modern society also witnesses ashift in the location of work. Beforeindustrialisation, most work took placeat home and was completed collectivelyby all members of the household.Advances in industrial technology,such as machinery operating onelectricity and coal, contributed to theseparation of work and home. Factoriesowned by capitalist entrepreneursbecame the focal point of industrialdevelopment.

Transformation of Work

Industrial processes were broken downinto simple operations that could beprecisely timed, organised andmonitored. Mass production demandsmass markets. One of the mostsignificant innovations was the

Activity 8

Have you seen a master weaver at

work? Find out how long one pieceof shawl may take to make?


Discuss the two forms of production in the two sets of visualsCloth production in a factory


Threshing of paddy in a village


construction of a moving assembly line.Modern industrial production neededexpensive equipment and continuousmonitoring of employees throughmonitoring or surveillance systems.

Over the last decades there has beena shift to what is often called ‘flexibleproduction’ and ‘decentralisation ofwork’. It is argued that in this periodof globalisation, it is the growingcompetition between firms andcountries that makes it essential forfirms to organise production suiting thechanging market conditions. Toillustrate how this new system operatesand what the implications may be forthe workers, read the quote from astudy of the garment industry inBangalore.

The industry is essentially part ofa long supply chain, and thefreedom of manufacturers is to thatextent extremely limited. There are,in fact more than a hundredoperations between the designerand the final consumer. In thischain, only 15 are in the hands ofthe manufacturer. Any seriousagitation for a rise in wages wouldlead manufacturers to shift theiroperations to other localities,beyond the reach of unionists...whether it is the payment of theexisting minimum wage, or itssubstantial revision upwards, whatis important is to enlist the supportof the retailer in order to create thenecessary pressure upon thegovernment and local agencies fora higher wage structure and itseffective implementation. Thus the

vision here is that of the creation ofan international opinion forum(Roy Choudhury 2005:2254).

Read the above given report carefully.Notice how the new organisation ofproduction and a body of customersoutside the country have altered theeconomics and the politics ofproduction.

IV

POLITICS

Political institutions are concerned withthe distribution of power in society. Twoconcepts, which are critical to theunderstanding of political institutions,are power and authority. Power is theability of individuals or groups to carryout their will even when opposed byothers. It implies that those who holdpower do so at the cost of others. Thereis a fixed amount of power in a societyand if some wield power others do not.In other words, an individual or groupdoes not hold power in isolation, theyhold it in relation to others.

This notion of power is fairlyinclusive and extends from family eldersassigning domestic duties to theirchildren to principals enforcingdiscipline in school; from the GeneralManager of a factory distributing workamong the executives to political leadersregulating programmes of their parties.The principal has power to maintaindiscipline in school. The president of apolitical party possesses power to expela member from the party. In each case,an individual or group has power to theextent to which others abide by theirwill. In this sense, political activities orpolitics is concerned with ‘power’.


But how is this ‘power’ applied toachieve its aim? Why do people complywith others’ commands? Answers tothese questions could be found withreference to a related concept of‘authority’. Power is exercised throughauthority. Authority is that form ofpower, which is accepted as legitimate,that is, as right and just. It isinstitutionalised because it is based onlegitimacy. People in general accept thepower of those in authority as theyconsider their control to be fair andjustified. Often ideologies exist that helpthis process of legitimation.

Stateless Societies

Empirical studies of stateless societies bysocial anthropologists over sixty yearsago demonstrated how order ismaintained without a moderngovernmental apparatus. There wasinstead the balanced oppositionbetween parts; cross-cutting alliances,based on kinship, marriage andresidence; rites and ceremonies involvingthe participation of friends and foes.

As we all know, the modern statehas a fixed structure and formalprocedures. Yet are not some of theinformal mechanisms mentioned aboveas features of stateless societies presentalso in state societies?

The Concept of the State

A state exists where there is a politicalapparatus of government (institutionslike a parliament or congress, plus civilservice officials) ruling over a giventerritory. Government authority isbacked by a legal system and by the

capacity to use military force toimplement its policies. The functionalistperspective sees the state asrepresenting the interests of all sectionsof society. The conflict perspective seesthe state as representing the dominantsections of society.

Modern states are very differentfrom traditional states. These states aredefined by sovereignty, citizenshipand, most often, ideas of nationalism.Sovereignty refers to the undisputedpolitical rule of a state over a giventerritorial area.

The sovereign state was not, at first,one in which citizenship carried with itrights of political participation. Thesewere achieved largely throughstruggles, which limited the power ofmonarchs, or actively overthrew them.The French Revolution and our ownIndian independence struggle are twoinstances of such movements.

Citizenship rights include civil,political and social rights. Civil rightsinvolve the freedom of individuals tolive where they choose; freedom ofspeech and religion; the right to ownproperty; and the right to equal justicebefore the law. Political rights includethe right to participate in elections andto stand for public office. In mostcountries governments were reluctantto admit the principle of universalfranchise. In the early years not onlywomen, but a large section of the malepopulation was excluded as holding acertain amount of property was aneligibility criterion. Women had to waitlonger for the vote.

The third type of citizenship rightsare social rights. These concern the


prerogative of every individual to enjoya certain minimum standard ofeconomic welfare and security. Theyinclude such rights as health benefits,unemployment allowance, setting ofminimum level of wages. Thebroadening of social or welfare rightsled to the welfare state, which wasestablished in Western societies sincethe Second World War. States of theerstwhile socialist countries hadfar-reaching provision in this sector. Inmost developing countries, this wasvirtually non-existent. All over theworld today these social rights arebeing attacked as liabilities on the stateand hindrances to economic growth.

Nationalism can be defined as a setof symbols and beliefs providing thesense of being part of a single political

community. Thus, individuals feel asense of pride and belonging, in being‘British’, ‘Indian’, ‘Indonesian’ or‘French’. Probably people have alwaysfelt some kind of identity with socialgroups of one form or another — forexample, their family, clan or religiouscommunity. Nationalism, however, onlymade its appearance with thedevelopment of the modern state.Contemporary world is marked both bya rapid expansion of the global marketas well as intense nationalist feelingsand conflicts.

Sociology has been interested in thebroader study of power, not just withthe formal apparatus of government. Ithas been interested in the distributionof power between parties, betweenclasses, between castes, and between

Activity 10

Find out when women got voting rights in different countries. Why do you thinkthat despite the right to vote and the right to stand for public office, women areso inadequately represented? Will power in its wider sense be a useful concept

to understand this under-representation in the Parliament and other bodies?Does the existing division of labour within families and households impactwomen’s participation in political life? Find out why there is a demand for 33

per cent reservation for women in the Parliament.

Activity 11

Collect information about differentstates doing away with social

rights. Find out what explanationis given for this. Discuss andsee whether you can see the

relationship between the economic,political and social spheres.

Activity 12

Collect information of events thatshow the growth of global inter-

connectedness as well as instancesof divisions along ethnic, religious,national conflicts. Discuss how

politics and economics may have apart to play in them.


communities based on race, languageand religion. Its focus is not just on whatmay be called specifically politicalassociation, such as state legislatures,town councils and political parties butalso associations such as schools,banks and religious institutions whoseaims are not primarily political. Thescope of sociology has been wide. Itsrange has extended from the study ofinternational movements (such aswomen or environmental) to villagefactions.

V

RELIGION

Religion has been a subject of studyand reflection for a very long time. InChapter 1, we have seen howsociological findings about society aredifferent from religious reflections. Thesociological study of religion is differentfrom a religious or theological study ofreligion in many ways. One, it conductsempirical studies of how religionsactually function in society and itsrelationship to other institutions. Two,it uses a comparative method. Three, itinvestigates religious beliefs, practicesand institutions in relation to otheraspects of society and culture.

The empirical method means thatthe sociologist does not have ajudgemental approach to religiousphenomena. The comparative methodis important because in a sense itbrings all societies on level with eachother. It helps to study without biasand prejudice. The sociologicalperspective means that religious lifecan be made intelligible only by relating

it to domestic life, economic life andpolitical life.

Religion exists in all knownsocieties, although religious beliefs andpractices vary from culture to culture.Characteristics that all religions seemto share are:

´ set of symbols, invoking feelings ofreverence or awe;

´ rituals or ceremonies;´ a community of believers.

The rituals associated with religionare very diverse. Ritual acts may includepraying, chanting, singing, eatingcertain kinds of food (or refraining fromdoing so), fasting on certain days, andso on. Since ritual acts are orientedtowards religious symbols, they areusually seen as quite distinct from thehabits and procedures of ordinary life.Lighting a candle or diya to honour thedivine differs completely in itssignificance from doing so simply tolight a room. Religious rituals are oftencarried out by an individual in his/herpersonal everyday life. But all religionsalso involve ceremonials practisedcollectively by believers. Regularceremonials normally occur in specialplaces — churches, mosques, temples,shrines.

Religion is about the sacred realm.Think of what members of differentreligions do before entering a sacredrealm. For example covering one’s head,or not covering one’s head, taking offshoes, or wearing particular kind ofclothes, etc. What is common to themall is the feeling of awe, recognitionand respect for sacred places orsituations.


Sociologists of religion, followingEmile Durkheim, are interested inunderstanding this sacred realm whichevery society distinguishes fromthe profane. In most cases, thesacred includes an element of thesupernatural. Often the sacred qualityof a tree or a temple comes with thebelief that it is sacred precisely becausethere is some supernatural force behindit. However, it is important to keep inmind that some religions like earlyBuddhism and Confucianism had noconception of the supernatural, but didallow sufficient reverence for things andpersons which they considered sacred.

Studying religion sociologicallylets us ask questions about therelationship of religion with other socialinstitutions. Religion has had a veryclose relationship with power andpolitics. For instance, periodically inhistory there have been religiousmovements for social change, likevarious anti-caste movementsor movements against genderdiscrimination. Religion is not just amatter of the private belief of anindividual but it also has a publiccharacter. And it is this public characterof religion, which has an importantbearing on other institutions of society.

We have seen how sociology looksat power in a wide sense. It is, therefore,of sociological interest to look at therelationship between political andreligious spheres. Classical sociologistsbelieved that as societies modernised,religion would become less influentialover various spheres of life. The conceptsecularisation describes this process.Contemporary events suggest apersisting role of religion in various

aspects of society. Why do you thinkthis is so?

A pioneering work by Max Weber(1864-1920) demonstrates howsociology looks at religion in itsrelationship to other aspects of socialand economic behaviour. Weber arguesthat Calvinism (a branch of ProtestantChristianity) exerted an importantinfluence on the emergence and growthof capitalism as a mode of economicorganisation. The Calvinists believedthat the world was created for the gloryof God, meaning that any work in thisworld had to be done for His glory,making even mundane works acts ofworship. More importantly, however,the Calvinists also believed in theconcept of predestination, which meantthat whether one will go to heaven orhell was pre-ordained. Since there wasno way of knowing whether one hasbeen assigned heaven or hell, peoplesought to look for signs of God’s will inthis world, in their own occupations.Thus if a person in whatever profession,was consistent and successful in his orher work, it was interpreted as a signof God’s happiness. The money earnedwas not to be used for worldlyconsumption; rather the ethics ofCalvinism was to live frugally. Thismeant that investment becamesomething like a holy creed. At theheart of capitalism is the concept ofinvestment, which is about investingcapital to make more goods, whichcreate more profit, which in turncreates more capital. Thus Weber wasable to argue that religion, in this caseCalvinism, does have an influence oneconomic development.


Religion cannot be studied as aseparate entity. Social forces alwaysand invariably influence religiousinstitutions. Political debates, economicsituations and gender norms willalways influence religious behaviour.Conversely, religious norms influenceand sometimes even determine socialunderstanding. Women constitute halfof the world’s population. Sociologicallytherefore it becomes important to askwhat relationship this vast segment ofhuman population has with religion.Religion is an important part of societyand is inextricably tied to other parts.The task of sociologists is to unravelthese various interconnections. Intraditional societies, religion usuallyplays a central part in social life.Religious symbols and rituals are oftenintegrated with the material and artisticculture of society. Read the extractwhich is given below in the box to get asense of how sociology studies religion.

VI

EDUCATION

Education is a life–long process,involving both formal and informalinstitutions of learning. Here we arehowever confining ourselves only toschool education. We are all aware howimportant getting admission into aschool is. We also know, for many of us,school is a step towards highereducation and finally employment. Forsome of us it may mean acquiring somenecessary social skills. What is commonin all cases is that there is a felt needfor education.

Sociology understands this need asa process of transmission/commu-nication of group heritage that iscommon to all societies. There is aqualitative distinction between simplesocieties and complex, modernsocieties. In the case of the former therewas no need for formal schooling.

Many extraneous factors have affected the traditional lives of the religiousspecialists. The most important of these are the growth of new employment and

educational opportunities in Nasik... after Independence, the way of life of thepriests has been changing fast. Now the sons and daughters are sent to school,and are trained for jobs other than traditional ones… Like all places of pilgrimage,

Nasik also gave rise to supplementary centres around religious activities. It wasa normal routine for a pilgrim to take home the sacred water of the Godavari ina copper pot. The coppersmiths provided these wares. The pilgrims also boughtwares, which they took home to be distributed as gifts among their relatives and

friends. For long Nasik was known for its proficient craftsmen in brass, copperand silver... Since the demand for their wares is intermittent and uncertain,not all the adult males can be supported by this occupation... Many

craftsmen have entered industry and business-both small and large scale(Acharya 1974:399-401).


Children learnt customs and thebroader way of life by participating inactivities with their adults. In complexsocieties, we saw there is an increasingeconomic division of labour, separationof work from home, need for specialisedlearning and skill attainment, rise ofstate systems, nations and complexsets of symbols and ideas. How do youget educated informally in suchcontext? How would parents or otheradults informally communicate all thathas to be known to the next generation?Education in such social context hasto be formal and explicit.

Furthermore modern complexsocieties, in contrast to simple societies,rest on abstract universalistic values.This is what distinguishes it from asimple society that depends onparticularistic values, based on family,kin, tribe, caste or religion. Schools inmodern societies are designed topromote uniformity, standardisedaspirations and universalistic values.There are many ways of doing this. Forexample one can speak of ‘uniformdress for school children’. Can youthink of other features that promotestandardisation?

For Emile Durkheim, no society cansurvive without a ‘common base-acertain number of ideas, sentimentsand practices which education mustinculcate in all children indiscriminately,to whatever social category they belong’(Durkheim 1956:69). Educationshould prepare the child for a specialoccupation, and enable the child tointernalise the core values of society.

The functionalist sociologist thusspeaks in terms of general socialneeds and social norms. For thefunctionalists, education maintainsand renews the social structure,transmits and develops culture. Theeducational system is an importantmechanism for the selection andallocation of individuals in theirfuture roles in the society. It is alsoregarded as the ground for provingone’s ability and hence selectiveagency for different status accordingto their abil i t ies. Recall ourdiscussion on the functionalistunderstanding of roles andstratification in Chapter 2.

For the sociologists who perceivesociety as unequally differentiated,education functions as a main

Discuss the visuals


stratifying agent. And at the sametime the inequality of educationalopportunity is also a product of socialstratification. In other words, we go todifferent kinds of schools depending onour socio-economic background. Andbecause we go to some kind of schools,we acquire different kind of privilegesand finally opportunities.

For instance some argue thatschooling ‘intensifies the existing dividebetween the elite and the masses.’Children going to privileged schoolslearn to be confident while childrendeprived of that may feel the opposite(Pathak 2002:151). However, there aremany more children who simply cannotattend school or drop out. For instancea study reports :

You are seeing some children in theschool now. If you come during thecultivation season you may seealmost zero attendance from the SCand ST children. They all take somehousehold responsibilities while theparents are out to work. And the girlchildren of these communitiesseldom attend school as they dovarious kinds of work both domesticand income generating. A 10-year-old girl picks dry cow dung to sell,for example (Pratichi 2002:60).

The report indicates how genderand caste discrimination impingeupon the chances of education. Recallhow we began this book in Chapter 1about a child’s chances for a good job

being shaped by a host of socialfactors. Your understanding of theway social institutions functionshould help you analyse the processbetter now.

Discuss the visual

Activity 13

A study of a kindergarten suggested that children learn that:´ ‘work activities are more important than play activities’.

´ ‘work includes any and all teacher-directed activities.’´ ‘work is compulsory and free time activities are called play’ (Apple 1979:102).

What do you think? Discuss.


GLOSSARY

Citizen : A member of a political community, having both rights and dutiesassociated with that membership.

Division of Labour : The specialisation of work tasks, by means of whichdifferent occupations are combined within a production system. All societieshave at least some rudimentary form of division of labour. With thedevelopment of industrialism, however, the division of labour becomes vastlymore complex than in any prior type of production system. In the modernworld, the division of labour is international in scope.

Gender : Social expectations about behaviour regarded as appropriate forthe members of each sex. Gender is seen as a basic organising principle ofsociety.

Empirical Investigation : Factual enquiry carried out in any given area ofsociological study.

Endogamy : When marriage is within a specific caste, class or tribal group.

Exogamy : When marriage occurs outside a certain group of relations.

Ideology : Shared ideas or beliefs, which serve to justify the interests ofdominant groups. Ideologies are found in all societies in which there aresystematic and engrained inequalities between groups. The concept ofideology connects closely with that of power, since ideological systems serveto legitimise the differential power which groups hold.

Legitimacy : The belief that a particular political order is just and valid.

Monogamy : When marriage involves one husband and one wife alone.

Polygamy : When marriage involves more than one mate at one time.

Polyandry : When more than one man is married to a woman.

Polygyny : When more than one woman is married to a man.

Service Industries : Industries concerned with the production of servicesrather than manufactured goods, such as the travel industry.

State Society : A society which possesses a formal apparatus of government.

Stateless Society : A society which lacks formal institutions of government.

Social Mobility : Movement from one status or occupation to another.

Sovereignty : The undisputed political rule of a state over a given territorialarea.


EXERCISES

1. Note what are the marriage rules that are followed in your society.Compare your observations with these made by other students in theclass. Discuss.

2. Find out how membership, residence pattern and even the mode ofinteraction changes in the family with broader economic, political andcultural changes, for instance migration.

3. Write an essay on ‘work’. Focus on both the range of occupations, whichexist and how they change.

4. Discuss the kind of rights that exist in your society. How do they affectyour life?

5. How does sociology study religion?

6. Write an essay on school as a social institution. Draw from both yourreading as well as your personal observations.

7. Discuss how these social institutions interact with each other. You canstart the discussion from yourself as a senior school student. And moveon to how you are shaped by different social institutions. Are you entirelycontrolled or can you also resist and redefine social institutions?

READINGS

ACHARYA, HEMLATA. 1974. ‘Changing Role of Religious Specialists in Nasik —The Pilgrim City’, in ed. RAO, M.S. An Urban Sociology in India : Readerand Source Book. Orient Longman, New Delhi, pp. 391-403.

APPLE, MICHAEL W. 1979. Ideology and Curriculum. Routledge and Kegan Paul,LONDON.

CHUGTAI, ISMAT. 2004. Tiny’s Granny in Contemporary Indian Short Stories;Series 1. Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.

DUBE, LEELA. 2001. Anthropological Explorations in Gender : Intersecting Fields.Sage Publications, New Delhi.

DURKHEIM, EMILE. 1956. Education and Sociology. The Free Press, New York.

PATHAK, AVIJIT. 2002. Social Implications of Schooling : Knowledge, Pedagogyand Consciousness. Rainbow Publishers, Delhi.

PRATICHI . 2002. The Pratichi Education Report. Pratichi Trust, Delhi.


ROY CHOUDHURY, SUPRIYA. 2005. ‘Labour Activism and Women in theUnorganised Sector : Garment Export Industry in Bangalore’, Economicand Political Weekly. May 28-June 4. pp. 2250-2255.

SHAH, A.M. 1998. Family in India : Critical Essays. Orient Longman, Hyderabad.

SINGH, YOGENDRA. 1993. Social Change in India : Crisis and Resilience.Har-Anand Publications, New Delhi.

UBEROI, PATRICIA. 2002. ‘Family, Kinship and Marriage in India’, in Student’sBritannica, India. Vol.6, Encyclopedia Britannica Private Ltd, New Delhi,pp.145-155.

63CULTURE AND SOCIALISATION

I

INTRODUCTION

‘Culture’, like ‘society’, is a term usedfrequently and sometimes vaguely.This chapter is meant to help us defineit more precisely and to appreciateits different aspects. In everydayconversation, culture is confined to thearts, or alludes to the way of life ofcertain classes or even countries.Sociologists and anthropologists studythe social contexts within which cultureexists. They take culture apart to tryand understand the relations betweenits various aspects.

Just like you need a map tonavigate over unknown space orterritory, you need culture to conductor behave yourself in society. Cultureis the common understanding, whichis learnt and developed through socialinteraction with others in society. Acommon understanding within a groupdemarcates it from others and gives itan identity. But cultures are neverfinished products. They are alwayschanging and evolving. Elements are

constantly being added, deleted,expanded, shrunk and rearranged. This makes cultures dynamic asfunctioning units.

The capacity of individuals todevelop a common understanding withothers and to draw the same meaningsfrom signs and symbols is whatdistinguishes humans from otheranimals. Creating meaning is a socialvirtue as we learn it in the company of

CHAPTER 4

CULTURE AND SOCIALISATION

Activity 1

How do you greet another person in

your ‘culture’? Do you greet differentkinds of persons (friends, olderrelatives, the other gender, people

from other groups) differently?Discuss any awkward experienceyou may have had when you did notknow how you should greet a

person. Is that because you did notshare a common ‘culture’? But nexttime round you will know what to

do. Your cultural knowledge therebyexpands and rearranges itself.


others in families, groups andcommunities. We learn the use of toolsand techniques as well as the non-material signs and symbols throughinteraction with family members,friends and colleagues in differentsocial settings. Much of this knowledgeis systematically described andconveyed either orally or throughbooks.

For example, notice the interactionbelow. Notice how words and facialexpressions convey meaning in aconversation.

social set up like in villages, towns andcities. In different environments, peopleadapt different strategies to cope withthe natural and social conditions. Thisleads to the emergence of diverse waysof life or cultures.

Disparities in coping mechanismswere evident during the devastatingtsunami of 26 December 2004, whichaffected some parts of the Tamil Naduand Kerala coast as well as the Andamanand Nicobar Islands in India. People onthe mainland and islands are integratedinto a relatively modern way of life. The

This learning prepares us forcarrying out our roles andresponsibilities in society. You havealready dealt with status and roles.What we learn in the family is primarysocialisation, while that which happensin school and other institutions aresecondary socialisation. We shalldiscuss this in greater detail later in thischapter.

II

DIVERSE SETTINGS, DIFFERENT CULTURES

Humans live in a variety of naturalsettings like in the mountains andplains, in forests and clear lands, indeserts and river valleys, in islands andmain lands. They also inhabit different

fisherfolk and the service personnel in theislands were caught unaware andsuffered large scale devastation andmuch loss of life. On the other hand, the‘primitive’ tribal communities in theislands like the Onges, Jarawas, GreatAndamanese or Shompens who had noaccess to modern science and technology,foresaw the calamity based on theirexperiential knowledge and savedthemselves by moving on to higherground. This shows that having accessto modern science and technology doesnot make modern cultures superior tothe tribal cultures of the islands. Hence,cultures cannot be ranked but can bejudged adequate or inadequate interms of their ability to cope with thestrains imposed by nature.

Commuter asks autodriver: “Indiranagar?” The verb that conveys the question —

“Bartheera?” or “Will you come?” — is implied in the arch of the eyebrow. Driverjerks his head in the direction of the back seat if the answer is “Yes”. If it is “No”(which is more likely the case as every true blue Bangalorean knows) he might

just drive away or grimace as if he has heard a bad word or shake his head witha smile that seems to suggest a “Sorry”, all depending on the mood of the moment.


Discuss how natural settings affect culture


Defining Culture

Often the term ‘culture’ is used to referto the acquiring of refined taste inclassical music, dance forms, painting.This refined taste was thought todistinguish people from the ‘uncul-tured’ masses, even concerningsomething we would today see asindividual, like the preference for coffeeover tea!

By contrast, the sociologist looks atculture not as something thatdistinguishes individuals, but as a wayof life in which all members of society

habits acquired by man as a memberof society” (Tylor 1871).

Discuss how the visualcaptures a way of life

Two generations later, the founderof the “functional school” of anthro-pology, Bronislaw Malinowski ofPoland (1884-1942) wrote: “Culturecomprises inherited artifacts, goods,technical process, ideas, habits andvalues” (Malinowski 1931:621-46).

Clifford Geertz suggested that welook at human actions in the same wayas we look at words in a book, and seethem as conveying a message. “… Manis an animal suspended in webs ofsignificance he himself has spun. I takeculture to be those webs…”.The searchis not for a causal explanation, but foran interpretative one, that is in searchfor meaning (Geertz 1973:5). LikewiseLeslie White had placed a comparableemphasis on culture as a means ofadding meaning to objective reality,using the example of people regardingwater from a particular source as holy.

participate. Every social organisationdevelops a culture of its own. One earlyanthropological definition of culturecomes from the British scholar EdwardTylor: “Culture or civilisation taken inits wide ethnographic sense, is thatcomplex whole which includesknowledge, belief, art, morals, law,custom and any other capabilities and

Activity 2

Find out from at least one regionother than your own how naturalenvironment affects food habits,patterns of dwelling, clothing and

the ways in which God or gods areworshipped.

Activity 3

Identify equivalents in Indianlanguages for the word culture.What associations do these carry?


´ Do you notice anything inMalinowski’s definition that ismissing in Tylor’s?

Apart from his mention of art, all thethings listed by Tylor are non-material.This is not because Tylor himself neverlooked at material culture. He was infact a museum curator, and most of hisanthropological writing was based onthe examination of artifacts and toolsfrom societies across the world, whichhe had never visited. We can now seehis definition of culture as an attemptto take into account its intangible andabstract dimensions, so as to acquire acomprehensive understanding of thesocieties he was studying. Malinowskihappened to be stranded on an islandin the Western Pacific during the FirstWorld War, and discovered thereby thevalue of remaining for an extendedperiod with the society one wasstudying. This led to the establishmentof the tradition of “field work” you willread about it in Chapter 5.

The multiple definitions of culturein anthropological studies led AlfredKroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn(anthropologists from the UnitedStates) to publish a comprehensivesurvey entitled Culture: A CriticalReview of Concepts and Definitions in1952. A sample of the variousdefinitions is presented below.´ Try comparing these definitions to

see which of these or whichcombination of these you find mostsatisfactory.You may first find yourself noticing

words which recur–‘way’, ‘learn’ and‘behaviour’. However, if you then lookat how each is used, you may be struckby the shifts in emphasis. The firstphrase refers to mental ways but thesecond to the total way of life.Definitions (d), (e) and (f) lay stress onculture as what is shared and passedon among a group and down thegenerations. The last two phrases arethe first to refer to culture as a meansof directing behaviour.

Culture is…

(a) a way of thinking, feeling, believing.

(b) the total way of life of a people.

(c) an abstraction from behaviour.

(d) learned behaviour.

(e) a storehouse of pooled learning.

(f) the social legacy the individual acquires from his group.

(g) a set of standardised orientations to recurrent problems.

(h) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behaviour.


Make a list of phrases you haveheard containing the word ‘culture’.Ask your friends and family what theymean by culture? What criteria do theyuse to distinguish among cultures?

It may have occurred to you thatour understanding of material culture,especially art, is incomplete withoutknowledge acquired from the cognitiveand normative areas. It is true that ourdeveloping understanding of socialprocess would draw upon all theseareas. But we might find that in acommunity where few have acquiredthe cognitive skill of literacy, it in factbecomes the norm for private letters tobe read out by a third party. But as wesee below, to focus on each of theseareas separately provides manyimportant insights.

Cognitive Aspects of Culture

The cognitive aspects of one’s ownculture are harder to recognise than itsmaterial aspects (which are tangible orvisible or audible) and its normativeaspects (which are explicitly stated).Cognition refers to understanding, howwe make sense of all the informationcoming to us from our environment. Inliterate societies ideas are transcribedin books and documents andpreserved in libraries, instititutions orarchives. But in non-literate societieslegend or lore is committed to memoryand transmitted orally. There arespecialist practitioners of oral traditionwho are trained to remember andnarrate during ritual or festive occasions.

Let us think about how writingmay affect the production andconsumption of art. In his influentialbook, Orality and Literacy Walter Ongcites a study of 1971 that states thatonly 78 of the approximately 3,000

Dimensions of Culture

Three dimensions of culture have beendistinguished :

(i) Cognitive: This refers to how welearn to process what we hear orsee, so as to give it meaning(identifying the ring of a cell-phoneas ours, recognising the cartoon ofa politician).

(ii) Normative: This refers to rules ofconduct (not opening otherpeople’s letters, performing ritualsat death).

(iii) Material: This includes any activitymade possible by means ofmaterials. Materials also includetools or machines. Examplesinclude internet ‘chatting’, usingrice-flour paste to design kolam onfloors.

Activity 4

Compare these definitions to seewhich of these (or combination ofthese) you find most satisfactory.

You could do this by listing familiaruses of the word ‘culture’ (theculture of eighteenth century

Lucknow, the culture of hospitalityor the much used term ‘Westernculture’...). Which of the definitionsbest captures the impressions

conveyed by each?


existing languages possess aliterature. Ong suggests that materialthat is not written down has certainspecific characteristics. There is a lotof repetition of words, to make itsimpler to remember. The audience ofan oral performance is likely to bemore receptive and involved thanwould be readers of a written text froman unfamiliar culture. Texts becomemore elaborate when they are written.

In societies like ours historicallyliteracy has been made available onlyto the more privileged. Sociologicalstudies are often concerned withinvestigating how literacy can be maderelevant to the lives of people whosefamilies have never gone to school. Thiscan lead to unexpected responses, likea vegetable-seller who asked why heneeded to know the alphabet when hecould mentally calculate what hiscustomers owed him?

The contemporary world allows usto rely far more on written, audio andvisual records. Yet students of Indianclassical music are still discouragedfrom writing down what they learnrather than carrying it in their memory.We still do not know enough about theimpact of the electronic media, ofmultiple channels, of instant accessingand surfing. Do you think these newforms impact our attention span andcognitive culture?

Normative Aspects of Culture

The normative dimension consists offolkways, mores, customs, conven-tions and laws. These are values orrules that guide social behaviour in

different contexts. We most often followsocial norms because we are used todoing it, as a result of socialisation. Allsocial norms are accompanied bysanctions that promote conformity. Wehave already discussed social controlin Chapter 2 .

While norms are implicit rules,laws are explicit rules. PierreBourdieu, the French sociologist hasreminded us that when we try tounderstand another culture’s norms,we must remember that there arecertain implicit understandings. Forexample, if a person wants to showgratitude for something s/he has beengiven, s/he should not offer a return-gift too quickly, or it seems like anattempt to get rid of a debt, not afriendly gesture.

A law is a formal sanction definedby government as a rule or principlethat its citizens must follow. Laws areexplicit. They are applicable to thewhole society. And a violation of thelaw attracts penalties and punishment. If in your home children are notallowed to stay outdoors aftersundown, that is a norm. It is specificto your family and may not beapplicable to all families. However, ifyou are caught stealing a gold necklacefrom someone else’s home, you haveviolated the universally accepted lawof private property and can be sent tojail after trial as punishment.

Laws, which derive from theauthority of the State are the mostformal definitions of acceptablebehaviour. While different schools mayestablish different norms for students,


laws would apply to all those acceptingthe authority of the State. Unlike laws,norms can vary according to status. Dominant sections of society applydominant norms. Often these norms arediscriminating. For example norms thatdid not allow dalits from drinking waterfrom the same vessel or even source. Orwomen from moving freely in the publicsphere.

Material Aspects of Culture

The material aspect refers to tools,technologies, machines, buildings andmodes of transportation, as well asinstruments of production andcommunication. In urban areas thewidespread use of mobile phones,music systems, cars and buses, ATMs(automated teller machines), refri-gerators and computers in everyday lifeindicates the dependence ontechnology. Even in rural areas the useof transistor radios or electric motorpumps for lifting water from below thesurface for irrigation demonstrates theadoption of technological devices forincreasing production.

In sum there are two principaldimensions of culture: material andnon-material. While the cognitive andnormative aspects are non-material, thematerial dimension is crucial toincrease production and enhancethe quality of life. For integratedfunctioning of a culture the materialand non-material dimensions mustwork together. But when the materialor technological dimensions changerapidly, the non-material aspects canlag behind in terms of values and

norms. This can give rise to a situationof culture lag when the non-materialdimensions are unable to match theadvances of technology.

Culture and Identity

Identities are not inherited butfashioned both by the individual andthe group through their relationshipwith others. For the individual thesocial roles that s/he plays impartsidentity. Every person in modernsociety plays multiple roles. Forinstance within the family s/he may bea parent or a child but for each of thespecific roles there are particularresponsibilities and powers.

It is not sufficient to enact roles.They also have to be recognised andacknowledged. This can often be donethrough the recognition of theparticular language that is used amongrole players. Students in schools havetheir own way of referring to theirteachers, other students, classperformances. By creating thislanguage which also serves as a code,they create their own world of meaningsand significances. Similarly, women arealso known to create their ownlanguage and through it their ownprivate space beyond the control of menespecially when they congregate at thepond to bathe in rural areas or acrosswashing lines on rooftops in urbanareas.

In a culture there can be many sub-cultures, like that of the elite andworking class youth. Sub-cultures aremarked by style, taste and association.Particular sub-cultures are identifiable


by their speech, dress codes, preferencefor particular kind of music or themanner in which they interact with theirgroup members.

Sub-cultural groups can alsofunction as cohesive units which impartan identity to all group members. Within such groups there can be leadersand followers but group members arebound by the purpose of the group andwork together to achieve theirobjectives. For instance youngmembers of a neighbourhood can forma club to engage themselves in sportsand other constructive activities. Suchactivities create a positive image of themembers in the locality and this givesthe members not only a positive self-image but also inspires them to performbetter in their activities. The orientationof their identity as a group undergoesa transformation. The group is able todifferentiate itself from other groupsand thereby create its own identitythrough the acceptance andrecognition of the neighbourhood.

cultural values projected as thestandard or norm are consideredsuperior to that of the beliefs and valuesof other cultures. We have seen inChapter 1 and in Chapter 3 (particularlyin the discussion on religion) howsociology is an empirical and not anormative discipline.

Underlying ethnocentric compari-sons is a sense of cultural superiorityclearly demonstrated in colonialsituations. Thomas BabbingtonMacaulay’s famous Minute onEducation (1835) to the East IndiaCompany in India exemplifiesethnocentrism when he says, ‘We mustat present do our best to form a classwho may be interpreters between us andthe millions whom we govern, a class ofpersons Indian in blood and colour butEnglish in tastes, in opinions, moralsand intellect’ (quoted in Mukherji 1948/1979:87), (emphasis added).

Ethnocentrism is the opposite ofcosmopolitanism, which values othercultures for their difference. Acosmopolitan outlook does not seek toevaluate the values and beliefs of otherpeople according to one’s own. Itcelebrates and accommodates differentcultural propensities within its fold andpromotes cultural exchange andborrowings to enrich one’s own culture.The English language has emerged asa leading vehicle of internationalcommunication through its constantinclusion of foreign words into itsvocabulary. Again the popularity ofHindi film music can be attributed toits borrowings from western pop musicas well as from different traditions of

Activity 5

Are you aware of any sub-culturalgroup in your locality? How are youable to identify them?

Ethnocentrism

It is only when cultures come intocontact with one another that thequestion of ethnocentrism arises.Ethnocentrism is the application ofone’s own cultural values in evaluatingthe behaviour and beliefs of people fromother cultures. This means that the


Indian folk and semi-classical formslike the bhangra and ghazal.

A modern society is appreciative ofcultural difference and does not closeits doors to cultural influences fromabroad. But such influences arealways incorporated in a distinctiveway, which can combine with elementsof indigenous culture. The Englishlanguage despite its foreign inclusionsdoes not become a separate language,nor does Hindi film music lose itscharacter through borrowings. Theabsorption of diverse styles, forms,sounds and artifacts provides anidentity to a cosmopolitan culture. Ina global world where modern means ofcommunication are shrinkingdistances between cultures, acosmopolitan outlook allows diverseinfluences to enrich one’s own culture.

Cultural Change

Cultural change is the way in whichsocieties change their patterns ofculture. The impetus for change can beinternal or external. In regard tointernal causes, for instance, newmethods of farming or agriculture canboost agricultural production, whichcan transform the nature of foodconsumption and quality of life of anagrarian community. On the otherhand external intervention in the formof conquest or colonisation can alsoaffect deep seated changes in thecultural practices and behaviour of asociety.

Cultural change can occur throughchanges in the natural environment,contact with other cultures orprocesses of adaptation. Changes inthe natural environment or ecology can

Notice the words in the box. Have you heard orused these words in your conversations?

‘Hinglish’ may soon conquer the world

Some of the Hinglish words in vogue include airdash (travel by air),chaddis (underpants), chai (Indian tea), crore (10 million), dacoit (thief),desi (local), dicky (boot), gora (white person), jungli (uncouth), lakh

(100,000), lampat (thug), optical (spectacles), prepone (bring forward),stepney (spare tyre) and would-be (fiancé or fiancée). Hinglish containsmany words and phrases that Britons or Americans may not easily

understand, according to a report... Some are archaic, relics of theRaj, such as ‘pukka’. Others are newly coined, such as ‘time-pass’,meaning an activity that helps kill time. India’s success in attracting

business has recently produced a new verb. Those whose jobs areoutsourced to India are said to have been ‘Bangalored’.


drastically alter the way of life of apeople. When forest dwellingcommunities are deprived of access tothe forest and its produce eitherbecause of legal restrictions or due toits decimation, it can have disastrouseffects on the dwellers and their way oflife. Tribal communities in North EastIndia as well as in middle India havebeen the worst affected by the loss offorest resources.

Along with evolutionary changethere can also be revolutionary change. When a culture is transformed rapidlyand its values and meaning systemsundergo a radical change thenrevolutionary change takes place.Revolutionary change can be initiatedthrough political intervention,technological innovation or ecologicaltransformation. The French Revolution(1789) transformed French society bydestroying the estate system of ranking,abolishing the monarchy, andinculcating the values of liberty,equality and fraternity among itscitizens. When a different under-standing comes to prevail, culturechange occurs. Recent years have seenan amazing expansion of the media,both electronic and print. Do you thinkthe media has brought about anevolutionary or revolutionary change?We are familiar with the variousdimensions of culture now. To returnto the point we started with in Chapter1 about the interplay between theindividual and society, we now move onto the concept of socialisation.

III

SOCIALISATION

I believe that a complete life isinclusive of everything around us :plants, cattle, guests, feasts,festivals, quarrels, friendship,companionship, discrimination,scorn. All these and more werepresent in one single place, myhome. Although life sometimesappeared complicated then, I nowunderstand how consummate itwas. It is thanks to such achildhood, perhaps, that if I get justa glimpse of someone’s suffering, Ifeel I can comprehend the whole ofit (Vaidehi 1945).

At the time of birth, the human infantknows nothing about what we callsociety or social behaviour. Yet as thechild grows up, s/he keeps learning notjust about the physical world, but aboutwhat it means to be a good or badgirl/boy. S/he knows what kind ofbehaviour will be applauded and, whatkind will be disapproved. Socialisationcan be defined as the process wherebythe helpless infant gradually becomes aself-aware, knowledgeable person,skilled in the ways of the culture intowhich s/he is born. Indeed withoutsocialisation an individual would notbehave like a human being. Many of youwill be familiar with the story of the‘Wolf-children of Midnapore’. Twosmall girls were reportedly found in awolf den in Bengal in 1920. They walkedon all four like animals, preferred a dietof raw meat, howled like wolves andlacked any form of speech. Interestingly


such incidents have been reported fromother parts of the world too.

We have so far been talking aboutsocialisation and the new-born infant.But the birth of a child also alters thelives of those who are responsible forits upbringing. They too undergo newlearning experiences. Becominggrandparents and parenting involves awhole set of activities and experiences.Older people still remain parents whenthey become grandparents, of course,thus forging another set of relationshipsconnecting different generations witheach other. Likewise the life of a youngchild changes with the birth of a sibling.Socialisation is a life-long process eventhough the most critical processhappens in the early years, the stage ofprimary socialisation. Secondarysocialisation as we saw extends over theentire life of a person.

While socialisation has animportant impact on individuals it isnot a kind of ‘cultural programming’,in which the child absorbs passively theinfluences with which he or she comesinto contact. Even the most recent new-born can assert her/his will. S/he willcry when hungry. And keep crying untilthose responsible for the infant’s carerespond. You may have seen hownormal, everyday schedules of thefamily get completely reorganised withthe birth of a child.

You have already been introducedto the concepts of status/role, socialcontrol, groups and social strati-fication. You are also acquainted withwhat culture, norms and values are. Allthese concepts will help us understand

how the process of socialisation takesplace. A child, in the first instance, is amember of a family. But s/he is also amember of a larger kin-group (biradari,khaandaan, a clan etc.) consisting ofbrothers, sisters and other relatives ofthe parents. The family into whichs/he is born may be a nuclear orextended family. It is also a member ofa larger society such as a tribe or sub-caste, a clan or a biradari, a religiousand linguistic group. Membership ofthese groups and institutions imposescertain behavioural norms and valueson each member. Corresponding tothese memberships there are roles thatare performed, e.g. that of a son, adaughter, a grandchild or a student.These are multiple roles, which areperformed simultaneously. The processof learning the norms, attitudes, valuesor behavioural patterns of these groupsbegins early in life and continuesthroughout one’s life.

The norms and values may differwithin a society in different familiesbelonging to different castes, regions orsocial classes or religious groupsaccording to whether one lives in avillage or a city or one belongs to a tribeand if to a tribe, to which tribe. Indeedthe very language that one speaksdepends on the region one comes from.Whether the language is closer to aspoken dialect or to a standardisedwritten form depends on the family andthe socio-economic and cultural profileof the family.

Agencies of Socialisation

The child is socialised by severalagencies and institutions in which


s/he participates, viz. family, school, peergroup, neighbourhood, occupationalgroup and by social class/caste,region, religion.

Family

Since family systems vary widely, theinfants’ experiences are by no meansstandard across cultures. While manyof you may be living in what is termeda nuclear family with your parents andsiblings, others may be living withextended family members. In the firstcase, parents may be key socialisingagents but in the others grandparents,an uncle or a cousin may be moresignificant.

Families have varying ‘locations’within the overall institutions of asociety. In most traditional societies, thefamily into which a person is bornlargely determines the individual’ssocial position for the rest of his/her life.Even when social position is notinherited at birth in this way the regionand social class of the family intowhich an individual is born affectpatterns of socialisation quite sharply.Children pick up ways of behaviourcharacteristic of their parents or othersin their neighbourhood or community.

Of course, few children simplytake over in an unquestioning waythe outlook of their parents. This

Activity 6

Suggest ways in which the child of a domestic worker would feel herself differentfrom the child whose family her mother works for. Also, what are the things theymight share or exchange?To start with the obvious, one would have more money spent on clothes, the

other might wear more bangles…They might have watched the same serials, heard the same film songs… theymight pick up different kinds of slang from each other…

Now you are left to follow up the difficult areas, like the sense of security withinthe family, the neighbourhood and on the street...

Activity 7

The presence or absence of which of the items below do you think would affectyou most as an individual?

(possessions) television set/music system …(space) a room of your own…(time) having to balance school with household or other work…(opportunities) travel, music classes…

(people around you)


is especially true in the contemporaryworld, in which change is so pervasive.Moreover, the very existence of adiversity of socialising agencies leads tomany differences between the outlooksof children, adolescents and theparental generation. Can you identifyany instance where you felt that whatyou learnt from the family was atvariance from your peer group or maybemedia or even school?

Peer Groups

Another socialising agency is the peergroup. Peer groups are friendshipgroups of children of a similar age. Insome cultures, particularly smalltraditional societies, peer groups areformalised as age-grades. Even withoutformal age-grades, children over fouror five usually spend a great deal oftime in the company of friends of thesame age. The word ‘peer’ means ‘equal’,and friendly relations establishedbetween young children do tend to bereasonably egalitarian. A forceful orphysically strong child may to someextent try to dominate others. Yet thereis a greater amount of give and takecompared to the dependence inherentin the family situation. Because of theirpower, parents are able (in varyingdegrees) to enforce codes of conductupon their children. In peer groups, bycontrast, a child discovers a differentkind of interaction, within which rulesof behaviour can be tested out andexplored.

Peer relationships often remainimportant throughout a person’s life.Informal groups of people of similar

ages at work, and in other contexts, areusually of enduring importance inshaping individuals’ attitudes andbehaviour.

Schools

Schooling is a formal organisation:there is a definite curriculum of subjectsstudied. Yet schools are agencies ofsocialisation in more subtle respectstoo. Alongside the formal curriculumthere is what some sociologistshave called a hidden curriculumconditioning children’s learning. Thereare schools in both India and SouthAfrica where girls, but rarely boys, areexpected to sweep their classroom. Insome schools efforts are made tocounter this by making boys and girlsdo those tasks that are normally notexpected of them. Can you think ofexamples that reflect both trends?

Mass Media

Mass media has increasingly becomean essential part of our everyday life.While today the electronic media likethe television is expanding, the printmedia continues to be of great

Activity 8

Reflect on your own experience.Compare your interaction with

friends to that of your parents andother elders. What is different? Doesthe earlier discussion on roles and

status help you understand thedifference?


importance. Even in the early printmedia in nineteenth century India,‘conduct-books’ instructing women onhow to be better house-keepers andmore attentive wives were popular inmany languages. The media can makethe access to information moredemocratic. Electronic communicationis something that can reach a villagenot connected by road and where noliteracy centres have been set up.

There has been much research onthe influence of television upon childrenand adults. A study in Britain showedthat the time spent by childrenwatching television is the equivalent ofalmost a hundred school days a year,and that adults are not far behind them.Apart from such quantitative aspects,what emerges from such research is notalways conclusive in its implications.The link between on-screen violenceand aggressive behaviour amongchildren is still debated.

If one cannot predict how mediainfluences people, what is certain is theextent of the influence, in terms of bothinformation and exposure to areas ofexperience distant from one’s own.There is a sizeable audience for Indiantelevision serials and films in countrieslike Nigeria, Afghanistan and amongémigrés from Tibet. The televisedMahabharat was aired after dubbing in

Tashkent, but even without dubbingwas watched in London by children whospoke only English!

Other Socialising Agencies

Besides the socialising agenciesmentioned, there are other groups, orsocial contexts, in which individualsspend large parts of their lives. Workis, in all cultures, an important settingwithin which socialisation processesoperate, although it is only inindustrial societies that large numbersof people “go out to work” — that is,go each day to places of work quiteseparate from the home. In traditionalcommunities many people tilled theland close to where they lived or had

Look at the report and discuss how mass media influences children

Activity 9

You might want to explore how

people relate to serials set insurroundings unlike their own. Orif children are watching television

with their grandparents, arethere disagreements about whichprogrammes are worth watching,and if so, what differences in

viewpoint emerge? Are thesedifferences gradually modified?

The Shaktimaan serial telecast a few years ago had children trying to

dive down buildings resulting in fatal accidents. “Learning by imitationis a method followed frequently by people and children are no different,”says clinical psychologist.


workshops in their dwellings (seevisuals on page 43).

Socialisation and IndividualFreedom

It is perhaps evident that socialisationin normal circumstances cannever completely reduce people toconformity. Many factors encourageconflict. There may be conflictsbetween socialising agencies, betweenschool and home, between home andpeer groups. However, since thecultural settings in which we are born

and come to maturity so influence ourbehaviour, it might appear that we arerobbed of any individuality or free will.Such a view is fundamentallymistaken. The fact that from birth todeath we are involved in interactionwith others certainly conditions ourpersonalities, the values we hold, andthe behaviour in which we engage. Yetsocialisation is also at the origin ofour very individuality and freedom.In the course of socialisation each ofus develops a sense of self-identity,and the capacity for independentthought and action.

How Gendered is Socialisation?

We boys used the streets for so many different things — as a place to standaround watching, to run around and play, try out the manoeuvrability of ourbikes. Not so for girls. As we noticed all the time, for girls the street was simply ameans to get straight home from school. And even for this limited use of the

street they always went in clusters, perhaps because behind their purposefuldemeanour they carried the worst fears of being assaulted (Kumar 1986).

Activity 11

We have completed four chapters. Read the text of the next page carefully anddiscuss the following themes :

´ The relation between individual and society in the girl’s rebellion againstgrown-ups.

´ How the normative dimensions of culture are different in town and village?

´ The question of ascribed status in that the priest’s daughter is permittedto touch.

´ Conflict between socialising agencies for example in the text note: “thankfulnone of her school friends could see her like this”. Can you find any other

sentence that illustrates this?

´ Gendered = combing hair + escort + not playing football

´ Punishment = “tight-lipped silence” + conspicuous absence of pappadams


An unusual sense of excitement pervaded her visit to the temple this evening.There had been an argument over lunch, between her and the grown-ups, whenshe had announced her decision to ring the bell in front of the sanctuary.

‘If Thangam can ring it, so can I,’ she debated hotly.They protested in shocked voices. ‘Thangam is the daughter of the temple

priest, she is permitted to touch the bell.’She responded angrily that Thangam came over to play hide-and-seek every

afternoon and behaved no differently from any of them. ‘Besides,’ she added,goading them deliberately, ‘we are equal in the eyes of god.’ She was not quitesure whether they had heard this bit, for they had already turned away indisgust. But, after lunch, she caught them whispering about ‘that horrid Englishschool she goes to,’ which meant that they had heard…

She was sure they had not taken her seriously. That was the trouble withgrown-ups: they always presumed that if they told her that she would understandeverything when she was older, she would accept their wisdom and authorityunquestioningly and not dream of going against them. Oh well, she would showthem, this time... Back again at the house, she had to endure the intenselyuncomfortable ritual of hairdressing. Her grandmother soothed her hair withwhat felt like a whole jar of oil, separated each shining strand till it hung limpand straight and lifeless down her back, then tied it up in a tight, skin stretchingknot on the top of her head. She was thankful none of her school friends couldsee her like this.…

Why wouldn’t they understand how ridiculous she felt, being escorted…Shehad reminded her mother many times that she walked alone to school everydaywhen they were back in town… [S]he noticed that the football game had alreadybegun on the courtyard beside the temple of Krishna. She enjoyed watching theplayers, particularly since her obvious delight in the vigour of the game, and inthe raucously voiced comments irritated Kelu Nair profoundly.…

She came hurriedly upon the crowded main sanctuary... Before she couldregret her decision or go back upon it, she elbowed herself quickly through thecircle of women, nearly floundering on the slippery steps. The sight of the bigbell above her touched her with a heady excitement. She could distinguish KeluNair’s frantically whispered threats, but she reached up, rang the bell with oneresounding clang and was down the steps before he realised what was happening.

Dimly she was aware of dark looks and subdued murmurs pursuing her asshe permitted Kelu Nair to drag her away... She was in dire disgrace. Theirtight-lipped silence was infinitely more eloquent than speech, as was theconspicuous absence of her favourite tiny pappadams at dinner...

(From The Bell, by Gita Krishnakutty)


GLOSSARY

Cultural Evolutionism : It is a theory of culture, which argues that just likenatural species, culture also evolves through variation and natural selection.

Estates System : This was a system in feudal Europe of ranking accordingto occupation. The three estates were the nobility, clergy and the ‘thirdestate’. The last were chiefly professional and middle class people. Eachestate elected its own representatives. Peasants and labourers did not havethe vote.

Great Tradition : It comprises of the cultural traits or traditions which arewritten and widely accepted by the elites of a society who are educated andlearned.

Little Tradition : It comprises of the cultural traits or traditions which areoral and operates at the village level.

Self Image : An image of a person as reflected in the eyes of others.

Social Roles : These are rights and responsibilities associated with a person’ssocial position or status.

Socialisation : This is the process by which we learn to become members ofsociety.

Subculture : It marks a group of people within a larger culture who borrowfrom and often distort, exaggerate or invert the symbols, values and beliefsof the larger culture to distinguish themselves.

EXERCISES

1. How does the understanding of culture in social science differ from theeveryday use of the word ‘culture’?

2. How can we demonstrate that the different dimensions of culturecomprise a whole?

3. Compare two cultures with which you are familiar. Is it difficult not tobe ethnocentric?

4. Discuss two different approaches to studying cultural change.

5. Is cosmopolitanism something you associate with modernity? Observeand give examples of ethnocentrism.

6. What in your mind is the most effective agent of socialisation for yourgeneration? How do you think it was different before?


READINGS

ARMILLAS, PEDRO. 1968. ‘The concept of civilisation’, in SILLS, DAVID. ed. TheInternational Encyclopedia of Social Science . Free Press-Macmillan, NewYork.

BERGER, P.L. 1963. Invitation to Sociology : A Humanistic Perspective. Penguin,Harmondsworth.

GEERTZ, CLIFFORD. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, New York.

GIDDENS, ANTHONY. 2001. Sociology. Polity Press, Cambridge.

Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), Unit 9, Agencies ofSocialisation.

Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), Unit 8, Nature ofSocialisation.

KOTTAK, CONRAD P. 1994. Anthropology : The Exploration of Human Diversity.Sixth Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York.

KUMAR, KRISHNA. 1986. ‘Growing up Male’, in Seminar. No. 318, February.

LARKIN, BRIAN. 2002. ‘Indian Films and Nigeria Lovers, Media and the Creationof Parallel Modernities’, in ed. XAVIER, JONATHAN. and ROSALDO, RENATO. TheAnthropology of Globalisation : A Reader. Blackwell, Malden.

MALINOWSKI , BRONISLAW. 1931. ‘Culture’, in SELIGMAN . ed. Encyclopedia of theSocial Sciences. Macmillan, New York.

MUKHERJI, D.P. 1948/1979. Sociology of Indian Culture. Rawat Publications,Jaipur.

TYLOR, EDWARD B. 1871/1958. Primitive Culture : Researches onto theDevelopment of Mythology, Philosophy Religion, Art and Custom. 2 volumes.Volume 1: Origins of Culture. Volume 2. Religion in Primitive Culture.Gloucester, Mass, Smith.

VOGT, EVON Z. 1968. ‘Culture Change’, in SILLS, DAVID. ed. The InternationalEncyclopedia of Social Science. Free Press-Macmillan, New York.

WILLIAMS, RAYMOND. 1976. Keywords : A Vocabulary of Culture and Society.Fontana/Croom Helm, London.


I

INTROUDUCTION

Have you ever wondered why a subjectlike sociology is called a social science?More than any other discipline,sociology deals with things that arealready familiar to most people. All ofus live in society, and we already knowa lot about the subject matter ofsociology — social groups, institutions,norms, relationships and so on—through our own experience. It seemsfair, then, to ask what makes thesociologist different from othermembers of society. Why should s/hebe called a social scientist?

As with all scientific disciplines, thecrucial element here is method, or theprocedures through which knowledgeis gathered. For in the final analysis,sociologists can claim to be differentfrom lay persons not because of howmuch they know or what they know,but because of how they acquire theirknowledge. This is one reason for thespecial importance of method insociology.

As you have seen in the previouschapters, sociology is deeply interestedin the lived experience of people. Forexample, when studying socialphenomena like friendship or religionor bargaining in markets, thesociologist wants to know not onlywhat is observable by the bystander,but also the opinions and feelings ofthe people involved. Sociologists try toadopt the point of view of people theystudy, to see the world through theireyes. What does friendship mean topeople in different cultures? Whatdoes a religious person think he/sheis doing when performing a particularritual? How do shopkeeper andcustomer interpret each other’s wordsand gestures while bargaining for abetter price? The answers to suchquestions are clearly part of the livedexperience of actors involved, and theyare of great interest to sociology. Thisneed to understand both the outsider’sand the insider’s points of view isanother reason why method isparticularly important in sociology.

CHAPTER 5

DOING SOCIOLOGY : RESEARCH METHODS

83DOING SOCIOLOGY: RESEARCH METHODS

II

SOME METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

Although it is often used simply as asubstitute for (or synonym of) ‘method’,the word ‘methodology’ actually refersto the study of method. Methodologicalissues or questions are thus about thegeneral problems of scientificknowledge-gathering that go beyondany one particular method, techniqueor procedure. We begin by looking atthe ways in which sociologists try toproduce knowledge that can claim tobe scientific.

Objectivity and Subjectivityin Sociology

In everyday language, the word‘objective’ means unbiased, neutral, orbased on facts alone. In order to beobjective about something, we mustignore our own feelings or attitudesabout that thing. On the other hand,the word ‘subjective’ means somethingthat is based on individual values andpreferences. As you will have learntalready, every science is expected to be‘objective’, to produce unbiasedknowledge based solely on facts. Butthis is much harder to do in the socialsciences than in the natural sciences.

For example, when a geologiststudies rocks, or a botanist studiesplants, they must be careful not to lettheir personal biases or preferencesaffect their work. They must report thefacts as they are; they must not (forexample) let their liking for a particularscientific theory or theorist influence theresults of their research. However, the

geologist and the botanist are notthemselves part of the world they study,i.e. the natural world of rocks or ofplants. By contrast, social scientistsstudy the world in which theythemselves live — the social world ofhuman relations. This creates specialproblems for objectivity in a socialscience like sociology.

First of all, there is the obviousproblem of bias. Because sociologistsare also members of society, they willalso have all the normal likes anddislikes that people have. A sociologiststudying family relations will herselfbe a member of a family, and herexperiences are likely to influence her.Even when the sociologist has no directpersonal experience of the group s/heis studying, there is still the possibilityof being affected by the values andprejudices of one’s own social context.For example, when studying a casteor religious community other than herown, the sociologist may be influencedby the attitudes about thatcommunity prevalent in her own pastor present social environment. How dosociologists guard against thesedangers?

One method is to rigorously andcontinuously examine one’s own ideasand feelings about the subject ofresearch. More generally, the sociologisttries to take an outsider’s perspectiveon her/his own work — she/he tries tolook at herself/himself and her/hisresearch through the eyes of others.This technique is called ‘self-reflexivity’,or sometimes just ‘reflexivity’. Thesociologist constantly subjects her own


attitudes and opinions to self-examination. S/he tries to consciouslyadopt the point of view of others,specially those who are the subjects ofher research.

One of the practical aspects ofreflexivity is the importance of carefullydocumenting whatever one is doing.Part of the claims to superiorityof research methods lies in thedocumentation of all procedures andthe formal citing of all sources ofevidence. This ensures that others canretrace the steps we have taken to arriveat a particular conclusion, and see forthemselves if we are right. It also helpsus to check and re-check our ownthinking or line of argument.

But however, self-reflexive thesociologist tries to be, there is alwaysthe possibility of unconscious bias. Todeal with this possibility, sociologistsexplicitly mention those features of theirown social background that might berelevant as a possible source of bias onthe topic being researched. This alertsreaders to the possibility of bias andallows them to mentally ‘compensate’for it when reading the research study.

(You could go back to Chapter 1, andre-read the section (pp. 7-8) which talksabout the difference between commonsense and sociology).

Another problem with objectivity insociology is the fact that, generally,there are many versions of the ‘truth’in the social world. Things look differentfrom different vantage points, and sothe social world typically involves manycompeting versions or interpretationsof reality. For example, a shopkeeperand a customer may have very differentideas about what is a ‘good’ price, ayoung person and an aged person mayhave very different notions of ‘goodfood’, and so on. There is no simpleway of judging which particularinterpretation is true or more correct,and often it is unhelpful to think inthese terms. In fact, sociology tries notto judge in this way because it is reallyinterested in what people think, andwhy they think what they think.

A further complication arises fromthe presence of multiple points of viewin the social sciences themselves. Likeits sister social sciences, sociology toois a ‘multi-paradigmatic’ science. This

Activity 1

Can you observe yourself as you observe others? Write a short description ofyourself as seen from the perspective of : (i) your best friend; (ii) your rival; (iii)your teacher. You must imagine yourself to be these people and think about

yourself from their point of view. Remember to describe yourself in the thirdperson — as ‘he’ or ‘she’ rather than ‘I’ or ‘me’. Afterwards, you can share similardescriptions written by your classmates. Discuss each others’ descriptions —how accurate or interesting do you find them? Are there any surprising things

in these descriptions?


means that competing and mutuallyincompatible schools of thoughtcoexist within the discipline (Recall thediscussion in Chapter 2 aboutconflicting theories of society).

All this makes objectivity a verydifficult and complicated thing insociology. In fact, the old notion ofobjectivity is widely considered to be anoutdated perspective. Social scientistsno longer believe that the traditionalnotion of an ‘objective, disinterested’social science is attainable; in fact suchan ideal can actually be misleading.This does not mean that there is nouseful knowledge to be obtained viasociology, or that objectivity is a uselessconcept. It means that objectivity hasto be thought of as the goal of acontinuous, ongoing process ratherthan an already achieved end result.

Multiple Methods and Choice ofMethods

Since there are multiple truths andmultiple perspectives in sociology, it ishardly surprising that there are alsomultiple methods. There is no singleunique road to sociological truth. Ofcourse, different methods are more orless suited to tackle different types ofresearch questions. Moreover, everymethod has its own strengths andweaknesses. It is thus futile to argueabout the superiority or inferiority ofdifferent methods. It is more importantto ask if the method chosen is theappropriate one for answering thequestion that is being asked.

For example, if one is interested infinding out whether most Indian

families are still ‘joint families’, then acensus or survey is the best method.However, if one wishes to compare thestatus of women in joint and nuclearfamilies, then interviews, case studiesor participant observation may all beappropriate methods.

There are different ways ofclassifying or categorising variousmethods commonly used bysociologists. It is conventional, forexample, to distinguish betweenquantitative and qualitative methods:the former deals in countable ormeasurable variables (proportions,averages, and the like) while the latterdeals with more abstract and hard tomeasure phenomena like attitudes,emotions and so on. A relateddistinction is between methods thatstudy observable behaviour and thosethat study non-observable meanings,values and other interpretational things.

Another way of classifying methodsis to distinguish the ones that rely on‘secondary’ or already existing data (inthe form of documents or other recordsand artefacts) from those that aredesigned to produce fresh or ‘primary’data. Thus historical methods typicallyrely on secondary material found inarchives, while interviews generateprimary data, and so on.

Yet another way of categorisation isto separate ‘micro’ from ‘macro’methods. The former are designed towork in small intimate settings usuallywith a single researcher; thus theinterview and participant observationare thought of as micro methods.Macro methods are those that are able


to tackle large scale research involvinglarge numbers of respondents andinvestigators. Survey research is the mostcommon example of a ‘macro’ method,although some historical methods canalso tackle macro phenomena.

Whatever the mode of classification,it is important to remember that it is amatter of convention. The dividing linebetween different kinds of methodsneed not be very sharp. It is oftenpossible to convert one kind of methodinto another, or to supplement one withanother.

The choice of method is usuallydictated by the nature of the researchquestion being addressed by thepreferences of the researcher, and bythe constraints of time and/orresources. The recent trend in socialscience is to advocate the use ofmultiple methods to bear on the sameresearch problem from differentvantage points. This is sometimesreferred to as ‘triangulation’, that is, aprocess of reiterating or pinpointingsomething from different directions. Inthis way, different methods can beused to complement each other toproduce a much better result thanwhat might have been possible witheach method by itself.

Because the methods mostdistinctive of sociology are those thatare designed to produce ‘primary’ data,these are the ones stressed here. Evenwithin the category of ‘field work’ basedmethods, we shall introduce you toonly the most prominent, namely thesurvey, interview and participantobservation.

Participant Observation

Popular in sociology and speciallysocial anthropology, participantobservation refers to a particularmethod by which sociologist learnsabout society, culture and people thath/she is studying (Recall the discussionon sociology and social anthropologyfrom Chapter 1).

This method is different fromothers in many ways. Unlike othermethods of primary data collection likesurveys or interviews, field workinvolves a long period of interactionwith the subjects of research.Typically, the sociologist or socialanthropologist spends manymonths — usually about a year orsometimes more — living among thepeople being studied as one of them.As a non-native ‘outsider’, theanthropologist is supposed toimmerse himself/herself in the cultureof the ‘natives’ — by learningtheir language and participatingintimately in their everyday life —in an effort to acquire all the explicitand impl ic i t knowledge andskills of the ‘insider’. Although thesociologist or anthropologist usuallyhas specific areas of interest, the overallgoal of ‘participant observation’ fieldwork is to learn about the ‘whole wayof life’ of a community. Indeed themodel is that of the child: sociologistsand anthropologists are supposed tolearn everything about their adoptivecommunities in just the holistic way thatsmall children learn about the world.

Participant observation is oftencalled ‘field work’. The term originated


in the natural sciences, speciallythose like botany, zoology, geologyetc. In these disciplines, scientistscould not only work in the laboratory,they had to go out into ‘the field’ tolearn about their subjects (like rocks,insects or plants).

III

FIELD WORK IN SOCIAL

ANTHROPOLOGY

Field work as a rigorous scientificmethod played a major role inestablishing anthropology as a socialscience. The early anthropologists wereamateur enthusiasts interested inexotic primitive cultures. They were‘armchair scholars’ who collected andorganised information about distantcommunities (which they had neverthemselves visited) available from thereports and descriptions written bytravellers, missionaries, colonialadministrators, soldiers and other ‘menon the spot’. For example, JamesFrazer’s famous book, The GoldenBough, which inspired many earlyanthropologists was based entirely onsuch second hand accounts, as was thework of Emile Durkheim on primitivereligion. Towards the end of the 19thand in the first decade of the 20thcentury many early anthropologists,some of whom were natural scientistsby profession, began to carry outsystematic surveys and first handobservation of tribal languages,customs, rituals and beliefs. Relianceon second hand accounts began to bethought of as unscholarly, and the good

results obtained from first hand workhelped cement this growing prejudice(See Box on next page).

Since the 1920s, participantobservation or field work has beenconsidered an integral part of socialanthropological training and theprincipal method through whichknowledge is produced. Almost all ofthe influential scholars in the disciplinehave done such field work — in fact,many communities or geographicalplaces have become famous in thediscipline because of their associationwith classic instances of field work.

What did the social anthropologistactually do when doing fieldwork?Usually, s/he began by doing a censusof the community s/he was studying.This involved making a detailed list ofall the people who lived in a community,including information such as their sex,age group and family. This could beaccompanied by an attempt to map thephysical layout of the village orsettlement, including the location ofhouses and other socially relevant sites.One of the important techniquesanthropologists use, specially in thebeginning stages of their field work isto construct a genealogy of thecommunity. This may be based on theinformation obtained in the census, butextends much further since it involvescreating a family tree for individualmembers, and extending the family treeas far back as possible. For example,the head of a particular household orfamily would be asked about hisrelatives — brothers, sisters, cousins —in his or her own generation;


Bronislaw Malinowski and the ‘Invention’ of Field Work

Although he was not the first to use this method — different versions of it hadbeen tried out all over the world by other scholars — Bronislaw Malinowski, aPolish anthropologist settled in Britain, is widely believed to have establishedfield work as the distinctive method of social anthropology. In 1914, when theFirst World War broke out in Europe, Malinowski was visiting Australia, whichwas a part of the British Empire at that time. Because Poland was annexed byGermany in the war, it was declared an enemy country by Britain, andMalinowski technically became an ‘enemy alien’ because of his Polish nationality.He was, of course, a respected professor at the London School of Economics andwas on very good terms with the British and Australian authorities. But sincehe was technically an enemy alien, the law required that he be “interned” orconfined to a specific place.

Malinowski had anyway wanted to visit several places in Australia and theislands of the South Pacific for his anthropological research, so he requestedthe authorities to allow him to serve his internment in the Trobriand Islands, aBritish-Australian possession in the South Pacific. This was agreed to — theAustralian government even financed his trip and Malinowski spent a yearand a half living in the Trobriand Islands. He lived in a tent in the native villages,learnt the local language, and interacted closely with the ‘natives’ in an effort tolearn about their culture. He maintained careful and detailed records of hisobservations and also kept a daily diary. He later wrote books on Trobriandculture based on these field notes and diaries; these books quickly becamefamous and are considered classics even today.

Even before his Trobriand experience, Malinowski had been converted tothe belief that the future of anthropology lay in direct and unmediated interactionbetween the anthropologist and the native culture. He was convinced that thediscipline would not progress beyond the status of an intellectual hobby unlessits practitioners engaged themselves in systematic first-hand observationpreceded by intensive language learning. This observation had to be done incontext — that is, the anthropologist had to live among the native people andobserve life as it happened rather than interviewing individual nativessummoned to the town or outpost for this purpose. The use of interpreters wasalso to be avoided — it was only when the anthropologist could interact directlywith the natives that a true and authentic account of their culture could beproduced.

His influential position at the London School of Economics and the reputationof his work in the Trobriand enabled Malinowski to campaign for theinstitutionalisation of field work as a mandatory part of the training imparted tostudents of anthropology. It also helped the discipline to gain acceptance as arigorous science worthy of scholarly respect.


then about his/her parents’generations — father, mother, theirbrothers and sisters etc. — then aboutthe grandparents and their brothers,sisters and so on. This would be donefor as many generations as the personcould remember. The informationobtained from one person wouldbe cross-checked by asking otherrelatives the same questions, and afterconfirmation, a very detailed family treecould be drawn up. This exercise helpedthe social anthropologist to understandthe kinship system of the community —what kinds of roles different relativesplayed in a person’s life and how theserelations were maintained.

A genealogy would help acquaintthe anthropologist with the structureof the community and in a practicalsense would enable him or her to meetwith people and become familiar withthe way the community lives. Buildingon this base, the anthropologist wouldconstantly be learning the language ofthe community. H/she would also beobserving life in the community andmaking detailed notes in which thesignificant aspects of community lifewould be described. Festivals, religiousor other collective events, modes ofearning a living, family relations, modesof child rearing — these are examplesof the kinds of topics thatanthropologists would be speciallyinterested in. Learning about theseinstitutions and practices requires theanthropologist to ask endless questionsabout things that are taken for grantedby members of the community. This isthe sense in which the anthropologist

would be like a child, always askingwhy, what and so on. In doing this, theanthropologist usually depends on oneor two people for most of theinformation. Such people are called‘informants’ or ‘principal informants’; inthe early days the term native informantwas also used. Informants act as theanthropologist’s teachers and arecrucially important actors in the wholeprocess of anthropological research.Equally important are the detailed fieldnotes that the anthropologist keepsduring field-work; these notes have towritten up every day without fail, andcan be supplemented by, or take theform of, a daily diary.

Activity 2

Some famous instances of fieldwork include the following:

Radcliffe-Brown on theAndaman Nicobar islands;Evans Pritchard on the Nuer

in the Sudan; Franz Boas onvarious Native American tribesin the USA; Margaret Mead on

Samoa; Clifford Geertz on Balietc.

Locate these places on amap of the world. What do

these places have in common?What would it have been likefor an anthropologist to live in

these places in a ‘strange’culture? What could be someof the difficulties they faced?


IV

FIELD WORK IN SOCIOLOGY

More or less the same techniques areused by sociologists when they dofield work. Sociological field workdiffers not so much in its content —what is done during field-work — butin its context — where it is done —and in the distribution of emphasisacross different areas or topics ofresearch. Thus, a sociologist wouldalso live among a community andattempt to become an ‘insider’.However, unlike the anthropologistwho typically went to a remote tribalcommunity to do field work,sociologists did their field workamong all sorts of communities.Moreover, sociological field work didnot necessarily involve ‘living in’,although it did involve spending most

of one’s time with the members of thecommunity.

For example, William Foote Whyte,an American sociologist, did his fieldwork among members of a street‘gang’ in an Italian-American slum ina large city and wrote a famous bookStreet Corner Society. He lived in thearea for three and half years ‘hangingout’ — just spending time together —with members of the gang or group,who were mostly poor unemployedyouth, the first American-borngeneration in a community ofimmigrants. While this example ofsociological field work is very close toanthropological field work, there areimportant differences (See Box). Butsociological field work need not onlybe this kind — it can take differentforms, as in the work of MichaelBurawoy, for example, another

Field Work in Sociology – Some Difficulties

Compared to the anthropologist who studies a primitive tribe in a remote part ofthe world, the student of a modern American community faces distinctly different

problems. In the first place, he is dealing with a literate people. It is certainthat some of these people, and perhaps many of them, will read his researchreport. If he disguises the name of the district as I have done, many outsiders

apparently will not discover where the study was actually located... The peoplein the district, of course, know it is about them, and even the changed names donot disguise the individuals for them. They remember the researcher and know

the people with whom he associated and know enough about the various groupsto place the individuals with little chance of error.

In such a situation the researcher carries a heavy responsibility. He wouldlike his book to be of some help to the people of the district; at least, he wants to

take steps to minimise the chances of it doing any harm, fully recognising thepossibility that certain individuals may suffer through the publication.

— William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society, p.342


American sociologist who worked forseveral months as a machinist in aChicago factory and wrote about theexperience of work from the perspectiveof workers.

In Indian sociology, an importantway in which fieldwork methods havebeen used is in village studies. In the1950s, many anthropologists andsociologists, both Indian and foreignbegan working on village life andsociety. The village acted as theequivalent of the tribal communitystudied by the earlier anthropologists.It was also a ‘bounded community’,and was small enough to be studied bya single person — that is, the sociologistcould get to know almost everyone inthe village, and observe life there.Moreover, anthropology was not verypopular with nationalists in colonialIndia because of its excessive concernwith the primitive. Many educatedIndians felt that disciplines likeanthropology carried a colonial biasbecause they emphasised the non-

modern aspects of colonised societiesrather than their progressive or positiveside. So, studying villages and villagersseemed much more acceptable andworthwhile for a sociologist thanstudying tribes only. Questions werealso being asked about the linksbetween early anthropology andcolonialism. After all, the classicinstances of field work like that ofMalinowski, Evans Pritchard andcountless others were made possibleby the fact that the places andpeople where field work was done werepart of colonial empires ruled by thecountries from where the Westernanthropologists came.

However, more than themethodological reasons, village studieswere important because they providedIndian sociology with a subject that wasof great interest in newly independentIndia. The government was interestedin developing rural India. The nationalmovement and specially MahatmaGandhi had been actively involved in

Activity 3

If you live in a village: Try to describe your village to someone who has neverbeen there. What would be the main features of your life in the village that youwould want to emphasise? You must have seen villages as they are shown infilms or on television. What do you think of these villages, and how do theydiffer from yours? Think also of the cities you have seen which are shown infilm or on television: would you want to live in them? Give reasons for youranswer.

If you live in a town or a city: Try to describe your neighbourhood to someonewho has never been there. What would be the main features of your life in theneighbourhood that you would want to emphasise? How does yourneighbourhood differ from (or resemble) city neighbourhoods as shown in filmor on television? You must have seen villages being shown in film or on television:would you want to live in them? Give reasons for your answer.


what were called ‘village uplift ’programmes. And even urbaneducated Indians were veryinterested in village life because mostof them retained some family andrecent historical links to villages.Above all, villages were the placeswhere most Indians lived (and stilldo). For these reasons village studies

became a very important part ofIndian sociology, and field workmethods were very well suited forstudying village society.

Some Limitations of ParticipantObservation

You have already seen what participantobservation can do — its main strength

Different Styles of Doing Village Studies

Village studies became the main preoccupation of Indian sociology during 1950sand 1960s. But long before this time, a very well known village study, BehindMud Walls, was written by William and Charlotte Wiser, a missionary couplewho lived for five years in a village in Uttar Pradesh. The Wisers’ book emergedas a by-product of their missionary work, although William Wiser was trainedas a sociologist and had earlier written an academic book on the jajmani system.

The village studies of the 1950s grew out of a very different context and weredone in many different ways. The classical social anthropological style wasprominent, with the village substituting for the ‘tribe’ or ‘bounded community’.Perhaps the best known example of this kind of field work is reported in M.N.Srinivas’s famous book, The Remembered Village. Srinivas spent a year in avillage near Mysore that he named Rampura. The title of his book refers to thefact that Srinivas’s field notes were destroyed in a fire, and he had to writeabout the village from memory.

Another famous village study of the 1950s was S.C. Dube’s Indian Village.As a social anthropologist at Osmania University, Dube was part of a multi-disciplinary team — including the departments of agricultural sciences,economics, veterinary sciences and medicine — that studied a village calledShamirpet near Secunderabad. This large collective project was meant not onlyto study the village but also to develop it. In fact, Shamirpet was meant to be asort of laboratory where experiments in designing rural development programmescould be carried out.

Yet another style of doing village studies is seen in the Cornell Village StudyProject of the 1950s. Initiated by Cornell University, the project brought togethera group of American social anthropologists, psychologists and linguists to studyseveral villages in the same region of India, namely eastern Uttar Pradesh. Thiswas an ambitious academic project to do multi-disciplinary studies of villagesociety and culture. Some Indian scholars were also involved with this project,which helped train many Americans who later became well known scholars ofIndian society.


is that it provides a very rich anddetailed picture of life from theperspective of the ‘insider’. It is thisinsider perspective that is the greatestreturn on the substantial investment oftime and effort that field work demands.Most other research methods cannotclaim to have a detailed knowledge ofthe ‘field’ over a fairly long period oftime — they are usually based on ashort and quick field visit. Field workallows for the correction of initialimpressions, which may often bemistaken or biased. It also permits theresearcher to track changes in thesubject of interest, and also to see theimpact of different situations orcontexts. For example, different aspectsof social structure or culture may bebrought out in a good harvest year andin a bad harvest year; people couldbehave differently when employed orunemployed, and so on. Because s/hespends a long period in ‘full time’engagement with the field, a participantobserver can avoid many of the errorsor biases that surveys, questionnairesor short term observation are inevitablysubject to.

But like all research methods, fieldwork also has some weaknesses —otherwise all social scientists would beusing this method alone!

Field work by its very natureinvolves very long drawn out andintensive research usually by a singlescholar working alone. As such, it canonly cover a very small part of theworld — generally a single village orsmall community. We can never be surewhether what the anthropologist orsociologist observed during fieldwork

is really very common in the largercommunity (i.e. in other villages, region,or in the country) or whether it isexceptional. This is probably thebiggest disadvantage of field work.

Another important limitation offield work method is that we are neversure whether it is the voice of theanthropologist we are hearing or thatof the people being studied. Ofcourse, the aim is to represent theviews of the people being studied, butit is always possible that theanthropologist —whether consciouslyor unconsciously — is selecting whatwill be written down in his/her notes,and how it will be presented to thereaders of his/her books or articles.Because there is no other version availableto us except that of the anthropologist,there is always the chance of bias orerror. However, this risk is present inmost research methods.

More generally, field work methodsare criticised because of the one-sidedrelationship they are based on. Theanthropologist/sociologist asks thequestions and presents the answersand speaks for ‘the people’. To counterthis, some scholars have suggestedmore ‘dialogic’ formats — that is, waysof presenting field work results wherethe respondents and people can bemore directly involved. In concreteterms, this involves translating thework of the scholar into the languageof the community, and asking theiropinion of it, and recording theirresponses. As the social, economic andpolitical distance or gap between theresearcher and the researched becomesless wide, there is greater and greater


chance that the scholar’s version will bequestioned, qualified, or corrected bythe people themselves. This will surelymake sociological research morecontroversial and much more difficult.But in the long run this can only be agood thing because it will help to takesocial science forward and make it moredemocratic, thus allowing many morepeople to participate in producing andcritically engaging with ‘knowledge’.

Surveys

Survey is probably the best knownsociological method, one that is now somuch a part of modern public life thatit has become commonplace. Today itis used all over the world in all sorts ofcontexts going well beyond theconcerns of sociology alone. In India,too, we have seen the increasing use ofsurveys for various non-academicpurposes, including the prediction ofelection results, devising of marketingstrategies for selling products, and foreliciting popular opinions on a widevariety of subjects.

As the word itself suggests, a surveyis an attempt to provide an overview. Itis a comprehensive or wide-rangingperspective on some subject based oninformation obtained from a carefullychosen representative set of people.Such people are usually referred to as‘respondents’ — they respond toquestions asked of them by theresearchers. Survey research is usuallydone by large teams consisting of thosewho plan and design the study (theresearchers) and their associates andassistants (the latter are called

‘investigators’ or ‘research assistants’).The survey questions may be askedand answered in various forms. Often,they are asked orally during personalvisits by the investigator, andsometimes through telephoneconversations. Responses may also besought in writing, to ‘questionnaires’brought by investigators or sentthrough the post. Finally, with theincreasing presence of computers andtelecommunication technology, thesedays it is also possible for surveys tobe conducted electronically. In thisformat, the respondent receives andresponds to questions by email, theInternet, or similar electronic medium.

The survey’s main advantage as asocial scientific method is that it allowsus to generalise results for a largepopulation while actually studyingonly a small portion of this population.Thus a survey makes it possible tostudy large populations with amanageable investment of time, effortand money. That is why it is such apopular method in the social sciencesand other fields.

The sample survey is able to providea generalisable result despite beingselective by taking advantage of thediscoveries of a branch of statisticscalled sampling theory. The keyelement enabling this ‘shortcut’ is therepresentativeness of the sample. Howdo we go about selecting a representativesample from a given population?Broadly speaking, the sample selectionprocess depends on two mainprinciples.


The first principle is that all therelevant sub-groups in the populationshould be recognised and representedin the sample. Most large populationsare not homogenous — they belong todistinct sub-categories. This is calledstratification (Note that this is astatistical notion of stratification whichis different from the sociologicalconcept of stratification that you havestudied in Chapter 4). For example,when considering the population ofIndia, we must take account of the factthat this population is divided into ruraland urban sectors which are verydifferent from each other. Whenconsidering the rural population of any

one state, we have to allow for the factthat this population lives in villages ofdifferent sizes. In the same way, thepopulation of a single village may bestratified by class, caste, gender, age,religion or other criteria. In short, thenotion of stratification tells us that therepresentativeness of a sample dependson its being able to reflect thecharacteristics of all the relevant stratain a given population. Which kinds ofstrata are considered relevant dependson the specific objectives of the researchstudy. For example, when doingresearch on attitudes towards religion,it would be important to includemembers of all religions. When

The Census and the National Sample Survey Organisation

The population census of India conducted every ten years is the largest suchexercise in the world. (China, the only country with a larger population, doesnot conduct a regular census.) It involves literally lakhs of investigators and astupendous amount of logistical organisation not to speak of the hugeexpenditure incurred by the Government of India. However, in return for thisoutlay, we get a genuinely comprehensive survey in which every household inIndia and every one of the more than one billion people living in India get included.Obviously, it is not possible to conduct such a gigantic survey very often; in fact,many developed countries no longer conduct a full census; instead they dependon sample surveys for their population data, because such surveys have beenfound to be very accurate. In India, the National Sample Survey Organisation(NSSO) conducts sample surveys every year on the levels of poverty andunemployment (and other subjects). Every five years it also conducts a biggersurvey involving about 1.2 lakh households covering more than 6 lakh personsall over India. In absolute terms this is considered a large sample, and theNSSO surveys are among the biggest regularly conducted surveys in the world.However, since the total population of India is over 100, crore you can see thatthe five-yearly survey of the NSSO involves a sample that is only about 0.06 percent or just over one twentieth of one per cent — of the Indian population! Butbecause it is scientifically selected to be representative of the total population,the NSSO sample is able to estimate population characteristics despite beingbased on such a tiny proportion.


researching attitudes towards tradeunions it would be important toconsider workers, managers andindustrialists, and so on.

The second principle of sampleselection is that the actual unit — i.e.person or village or household —should be based purely on chance. Thisis referred to as randomisation, whichitself depends on the concept ofprobability. You may have come acrossthe idea of probability in mathematicscourse. Probability refers to the chance(or the odds) of an event happening. Forexample, when we toss a coin, it canfall with the ‘head’ side up or the ‘tail’side up. With normal coins, thechance — or probability — of heads ortails appearing is exactly the same, thatis 50 per cent each. Which of the twoevents actually happens when you tossthe coin — i.e. whether it comes upheads or tails — depends purely onchance and nothing else. Events likethis are called random events.

We use the same idea in selecting asample. We try to ensure that the actualperson or household or village chosento be part of the sample is chosenpurely by chance and nothing else.Thus, being chosen in the sample is amatter of luck, like winning a lottery.It is only if this is true that the samplewill be a representative sample. If asurvey team chooses only villages thatare near the main highway in theirsample, then the sample is not arandom or chance sample but abiased one. Similarly, if we choosemostly middle class households, orhouseholds that we know, then the

sample is again likely to be biased. Thepoint is that after the relevant strata ina population are identified, the actualchoosing of sample households orrespondents should be a matter of purechance. This can be ensured in variousways. Different techniques are used toachieve this, the common ones beingdrawing of lots (or lottery), rolling ofdice, the use of random number tablesspecially produced for this purpose,and more recently, random numbersgenerated by calculators or computers.

To understand how a survey sampleis actually selected, let us take a concreteexample. Suppose we wish to examinethe hypothesis that living in smaller andmore intimate communities producesgreater intercommunity harmony thanliving in larger, more impersonalcommunities. For the sake of simplicity,let us suppose we are interested onlyin the rural sector of a single state inIndia. The simplest possible sampleselection process would begin with a listof all villages in the state along with theirpopulation (Such a list could beobtained from the census data). Thenwe would decide on the criteria fordefining ‘small’ and ‘large’ villages.From the original list of villages we noweliminate all the ‘medium’ villages, i.e.those that are neither small nor big.Now we have a revised list stratified bysize of village. Given our researchquestion, we want to give equalweightage to each of the strata, i.e.small and big villages, so we decide toselect 10 villages from each. To do this,we number the list of small andbig villages, and randomly select


10 numbers from each list by drawinglots. We now have our sample,consisting of 10 big and 10 smallvillages from the state, and we canproceed to study those villages to see ifour initial hypothesis was true or false.

Of course, this is an extremelysimple design; actual research studiesusually involve more complicateddesigns with the sample selectionprocess being divided into many stagesand incorporating many strata. But thebasic principles remain the same — asmall sample is carefully selected suchthat it is able to represent or stand forthe entire population. Then the sampleis studied and the results obtained forit are generalised to the entirepopulation. The statistical propertiesof a scientifically selected sampleensure that the characteristics of thesample will closely resemble thecharacteristics of the population it isdrawn from. There may be smalldifferences, but the chance of suchdeviations occuring can be specified.This is known as the margin of error,or sampling error. It arises not due toany mistakes made by researchers but

because we are using a small sampleto stand for a large population. Whenreporting the results of sample surveys,researchers must specify the size anddesign of their sample and the marginof error.

The main strength of the surveymethod is that it is able to provide abroad overview representative of a largepopulation with relatively small outlaysof time and money. The bigger thesample the more chance it has of beingtruly representative; the extreme casehere is that of the census, whichincludes the entire population. Inpractice, sample sizes may vary from30-40 to many thousands. (See the boxon the National Sample Survey). It isnot only the size of the sample thatmatters; its mode of selection is evenmore important. Of course, decisionson sample selection can often be basedon practical considerations.

In situations where a census is notfeasible the survey becomes the onlyavailable means of studying thepopulation as a whole. The uniqueadvantage of the survey is that itprovides an aggregated picture, that is,

Activity 4

Discuss among yourselves some of the surveys you have come across. Thesemay be election surveys, or other small surveys by newspapers or televisionchannels. When the results of the survey were reported, was the margin oferror also mentioned? Were you told about the size of the sample and how it wasselected? You must always be suspicious of surveys where these aspects of theresearch method are not clearly specified, because without them, it is not possibleto evaluate the findings. Survey methods are often misused in the popularmedia: big claims are made on the basis of biased and unrepresentative sample.You could discuss some specific surveys you have come across from this point ofview.


Activity 5

How would you go about selecting a representative sample for a survey of allstudents in your school if the objective of the survey were to answer the following

questions:(i) Do students with many brothers and sisters do better or worse in studies

compared to those with only one brother or sister (or none)?

(ii) What is the most popular break-time activity for students in the primaryschool (Classes I-V), middle school (Classes VI-VIII), secondary school(Classes IX-X) and senior secondary school (Classes XI-XII)?

(iii) Is a student’s favourite subject likely to be the subject taught by thefavourite teacher? Is there any difference between boys and girls in thisregard?

(Note: Make different sample designs for each of these questions).

Aggregate Statistics: the Alarming Decline in the Sex Ratio

You have read about the sharp fall in the sex ratio in Chapter 3. In recentdecades, fewer and fewer girls are being born relative to the number of boys,and the problem has reached worrying levels in states such as Punjab, Haryana,Delhi and Himachal Pradesh.

The (juvenile, or child) sex ratio is expressed as the number of girls per1,000 boys in the age group of 0-6 years. This ratio has been falling steadilyover the decades both for India as a whole and for many states in particular.Here are some of the average juvenile sex ratios for India and selected states asrecorded in the Census of 1991 and 2000.

Number of girls per 1,000 boys in the age group of 0-6 years1991 2001

India 945 927Punjab 875 793

Haryana 879 820Delhi 915 865

Gujarat 928 878Himachal Pradesh 951 897

The child sex ratio is an aggregate (or macro) variable that only becomesvisible when you collate (or put together) statistics for large populations. Wecannot tell by looking at individual families that there is such a severe problem.The relative proportion of boys and girls in any individual family could alwaysbe compensated by a different proportion in other families we have not lookedat. It is only by using methods like a census or large scale survey that theoverall ratio for the community as a whole can be calculated and the problemcan be identified. Can you think of other social issues that can only be studiedby surveys or censuses?


a picture based on a collectivity ratherthan on single individuals takenseparately. Many social problems andissues become visible only at thisaggregative level — they cannot beidentified at the more micro levels ofinvestigation.

However, like all research methods,survey also has its disadvantages.Although it offers the possibility ofwide coverage, this is at the cost ofdepth of coverage. It is usually notpossible to get in-depth informationfrom respondents as part of a largesurvey. Because of the large numberof respondents, the time spent on eachmust be limited. Moreover, since thesurvey questionnaire is being takenaround to respondents by a relativelylarge number of investigators, itbecomes difficult to ensure thatcomplicated questions or thoserequiring detailed prompting will beasked of all respondents in exactly thesame way. Differences in the wayquestions are asked or answersrecorded could introduce errors intothe survey. That is why thequestionnaire for a survey (sometimescalled a ‘survey instrument’) has to bedesigned very carefully — since it willbe handled by persons other than theresearchers themselves, there is littlechance of corrections or modificationsin the course of its use.

Given that there is no long-termrelationship between investigator andrespondent and hence no familiarityor trust, questions that can be askedin a survey have to be of the kind thatcan be asked and answered betweenstrangers. Questions of a personal or

sensitive kind cannot be asked, or ifasked are likely to be answered‘safely’ rather than truthfully. Thesekinds of problems are sometimesrefered to as ‘non-sampling errors’,that is, errors due not to the samplingprocess but to faults or shortcomingsof the research design or the mannerin which it was implemented.Unfortunately, some of these errors aredifficult to foresee and guard against,so that it is possible for surveys to gowrong and produce misleading or falseestimates of the characteristics of apopulation. Ultimately, the mostimportant limitation of survey is that,in order to be successful,it must depend on a tightly structuredinflexible questionnaire. Moreover,howsoever well designed thequestionnaire might be, its successdepends finally on the nature of theinteractions between investigators andrespondents, and specially on thegoodwill and cooperation of the latter.

Interview

An interview is basically a guidedconversation between the researcherand the respondent. Although it hasfew technicalities associated with it, thesimplicity of the format can bedeceptive because it actually takes alot of practice and skill to become agood interviewer. Interview occupiesthe ground between a structuredquestionnaire of the type usedin surveys, and the completelyopen-ended interactions typicalof participant observation methods.Its chief advantage is the extreme


flexibility of the format. Questionscan be re-phrased or even stateddifferently; the order of subjects orquestions can be changed accordingto the progress (or lack of progress) inthe conversation; subjects that areproducing good material can beextended and built upon others thatprovoke unfavourable reactions can becut short or postponed to a lateroccasion, and all this can be doneduring the course of the interview itself.

On the other hand, many of thedisadvantages of the interview as aresearch method are also related to itsadvantages. The very same flexibilitycan also make interview vulnerableto changes of mood on the part ofrespondent, or to lapses ofconcentration on the part of interviewer.It is in this sense an unstable andunpredictable format — it works verywell when it works, and fails miserablywhen it doesn’t.

There are different styles ofinterviewing and opinions andexperiences differ as to their relativeadvantages. Some prefer a very looselystructured format, with only a check-list of topics rather than actualquestions; others like to have morestructure, with specific questions to beasked of all respondents. How interviewis recorded can also differ according tocircumstances and preferences,ranging from actual video or audiorecording, detailed note taking duringinterview, or relying on memory andwriting up the interview after it is

concluded. The introduction ofequipment like recorders and so onfrequently makes the respondentuneasy and introduces a degree offormality into the conversation. On theother hand, important information cansometimes go unnoticed or not berecorded at all when other lesscomprehensive methods of recordkeeping are being employed.Sometimes the physical or socialcircumstances in which the interview isbeing conducted determine the modeof recording. The way in which theinterview is later written for publicationor as part of a research report can alsodiffer widely. Some researchers preferto edit the transcript and present a‘cleaned up’ continuous narrative;others wish to retain the flavour of theoriginal conversation as much aspossible and therefore include all theasides and digressions as well.

The interview is often used alongwith or as a supplement to othermethods, specially participantobservation and surveys. Longconversations with ‘key informants’ (themain informant in a participantobservation study) can often provide aconcentrated account that situates andclarifies the accompanying material.Similarly, intensive interviews can adddepth and detail to the findings of asurvey. However, as a method, theinterview is dependent on personalisedaccess and the degree of rapport ormutual trust between the respondentand the researcher.


GLOSSARY

Census : A comprehensive survey covering every single member of apopulation.

Genealogy : An extended family tree outlining familial relations acrossgenerations.

Non-sampling Error : Errors in survey results due to mistakes in the designor application of methods.

Population : In the statistical sense, the larger body (of persons, villages,households, etc.) from which a sample is drawn.

Probability : The likelihood or odds of an event occuring (in the statisticalsense).

Questionnaire : A written list of questions to be asked in a survey orinterview.

Randomisation : Ensuring that an event (such as the selection of aparticular item in the sample) depends purely on chance and nothing else.

Reflexivity : The researcher’s ability to observe and analyse oneself.

Sample : A subset or selection (usually small) drawn from and representinga larger population.

Sampling Error : The unavoidable margin of error in the results of a surveybecause it is based on information from only a small sample rather thanthe entire population.

Stratification : According to the the statistical sense, the subdivision of apopulation into distinct groups based on relevant criteria such as gender,location, religion, age etc.

EXERCISES

1. Why is the question of a scientific method particularly important insociology?

2. What are some of the reasons for ‘objectivity’ being more complicatedin social sciences, particularly disciplines like sociology?

3. How do sociologists try to deal with these difficulties and strive forobjectivity?

4. What is meant by ‘reflexivity’ and why is it important in sociology?

5. What are some of the things that ethnographers and sociologists doduring participant observation?


6. What are the strengths and weaknesses of participant observationas a method?

7. What are the basic elements of the survey method? What is chiefadvantage of this method?

8. Describe some of the criteria involved in selecting a representativesample.

9. State some of the weaknesses of the survey method.

10. Describe main features of the interview as a research method.

READINGS

BAUMAN, ZYGMUNT. 1990. Thinking Sociologically . Basil Blackwell, OxfordUniversity Press, New Delhi.

BECKER, HOWARD S. 1970. Sociological Work : Method and Substance. ThePenguin Press, Allen Lane.

BETEILLE, ANDRE and MADAN, T.N. ed. 1975. Encounter and experience : PersonalAccounts of Fieldwork. Vikas Publishing House, Delhi.

BURGESS, ROBERT G. ed. 1982. Field Research : A Sourcebook and Field Manual.George Allen and Unwin, London.

COSER, LEWIS. RHEA, A.B. STEFFAN, P.A. and NOCK, S.L. 1983. Introduction toSociology. Harcourt Brace Johanovich, New York.

SRINIVAS. M.N. SHAH, A.M. and RAMASWAMY, E.A. ed. 2002. The fieldworker andthe Field : Problems and Challenges in Sociological Investigation. 2ndEdition, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

Sociology XI Introducing Sociology

Documents

Transcript of Sociology XI Introducing Sociology