Introducing Society 1 · Section 21

Contemporary global processes have further accentuated this ‘shrinking of the globe’. The assumption of studying a simple society was that it was bounded. We know this is not so today. The traditional study of simple, non-literate societies by social anthropology had a pervasive influence on the content and the subject matter of the discipline.

Social anthropology tended to study society (simple societies) in all their aspects, as wholes. In so far as they specialised, it was on the basis of area as for example the Andaman Islands, the Nuers or Melanesia. Sociologists study complex societies and would therefore often focus on parts of society like the bureaucracy or religion or caste or a process such as social mobility. Social anthropology was charac- terised by long field work tradition, living in the community studied and using ethnographic research methods.

Sociologists have often relied on survey method and quantitative data using statistics and the questionnaire mode. Chapter will give you a more comprehensive account of these two traditions. Today the distinction between a simple society and a complex one itself needs major rethinking. India itself is a complex mix of tradition and modernity, of the village and the city, of caste and tribe, of class and community.

Villages nestle right in the heart of the capital city of Delhi. Call centres serve European and American clients from different towns of the country. Indian sociology has been far more eclectic in borrowing from both traditions. Indian sociologists often studied Indian societies that were both part of and not of one’s own culture.

It could also be dealing with both complex differentiated societies of urban modern India as well as the study of tribes in a holistic fashion. It had been feared that with the decline of simple societies, social anthropology would lose its specificity and merge with sociology. However there have been fruitful interchanges between the two disciplines and today often methods and techniques are drawn from both. There have been anthropological studies of the state and globalisation, which are very different from the traditional subject matter of social anthropology.

On the other hand, sociology too has been using quantitative and qualitative techniques, macro and micro approaches for studying the complexities of modern societies. As mentioned before we will in a sense carry on this discussion in Chapter . For in India, sociology and social anthropology have had a very close relationship. Activity ´ Find out where in India did ancestors of the community of Santhal workers who have been working in the tea plantations in Assam come from.

´ When was tea cultivation started in Assam? ´ Did the British drink tea before colonialism?