Introducing Society 4 · Section 11

drastically alter the way of life of a people. When forest dwelling communities are deprived of access to the forest and its produce either because of legal restrictions or due to its decimation, it can have disastrous effects on the dwellers and their way of life. Tribal communities in North East India as well as in middle India have been the worst affected by the loss of forest resources. Along with evolutionary change there can also be revolutionary change.

When a culture is transformed rapidly and its values and meaning systems undergo a radical change then revolutionary change takes place. Revolutionary change can be initiated through political intervention, technological innovation or ecological transformation. The French Revolution ( ) transformed French society by destroying the estate system of ranking, abolishing the monarchy, and inculcating the values of liberty, equality and fraternity among its citizens. When a different under- standing comes to prevail, culture change occurs.

Recent years have seen an amazing expansion of the media, both electronic and print. Do you think the media has brought about an evolutionary or revolutionary change? We are familiar with the various dimensions of culture now. To return to the point we started with in Chapter about the interplay between the individual and society, we now move on to the concept of socialisation.

III SOCIALISATION I believe that a complete life is inclusive of everything around us : plants, cattle, guests, feasts, festivals, quarrels, friendship, companionship, discrimination, scorn. All these and more were present in one single place, my home. Although life sometimes appeared complicated then, I now understand how consummate it was. It is thanks to such a childhood, perhaps, that if I get just a glimpse of someone’s suffering, I feel I can comprehend the whole of it (Vaidehi ).

At the time of birth, the human infant knows nothing about what we call society or social behaviour. Yet as the child grows up, s/he keeps learning not just about the physical world, but about what it means to be a good or bad girl/boy. S/he knows what kind of behaviour will be applauded and, what kind will be disapproved. Socialisation can be defined as the process whereby the helpless infant gradually becomes a self-aware, knowledgeable person, skilled in the ways of the culture into which s/he is born.

Indeed without socialisation an individual would not behave like a human being. Many of you will be familiar with the story of the ‘Wolf-children of Midnapore’. Two small girls were reportedly found in a wolf den in Bengal in . They walked on all four like animals, preferred a diet of raw meat, howled like wolves and lacked any form of speech.

Interestingly