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SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIETY 21 Today the distinction between a Activity 10 simple society and a complex one itself • Find out where in India did needs major rethinking. India itself is a ancestors of the community of complex mix of tradition and Santhal workers who have been modernity, of the village and the city, working in the tealantations in Assam come from. of caste and tribe, of class and • When was tea cultivation community. Villages nestle right in the heart of the capital city of Delhi. Call started in Assam? centres serve European and American • Did the British drink tea before clients from different towns of the colonialism? country. Indian sociology has been far more Contemporary global processes have eclectic in borrowing from both further accentuated this ‘shrinking of traditions. Indian sociologists often the globe’. The assumption of studying a simple society was that it was studied Indian societies that were both bounded. We know this is not so today. part of and not of one’s own culture. It could also be dealing with both The traditional study of simple, complex differentiated societies of non-literate societies by social anthropology had a pervasive influence urban modern India as well as the on the content and the subject matter study of tribes in a holistic fashion. It had been feared that with the of the discipline. Social anthropology decline of simple societies, social tended to study society (simple anthropology would lose its specificity societies) in all their aspects, as wholes. In so far as they specialised, it was on and merge with sociology. However the basis of area as for example the there have been fruitful interchanges between the two disciplines and today Andaman Islands, the Nuers or often methods and techniques are Melanesia. Sociologists study complex societies and would therefore often drawn from both. There have been focus on parts of society like the anthropological studies of the state and bureaucracy or religion or caste or a globalisation, which are very different from the traditional subject matter process such as social mobility. Social anthropology was charac- of social anthropology. On the terised by long field work tradition, other hand, sociology too has been living in the community studied and using quantitative and qualitative techniques,macroandmicroapproaches using ethnographic research methods. Sociologists have often relied on survey forstudyingthecomplexitiesofmodern method and quantitative data using societies. As mentioned before we will statistics and the questionnaire mode. in a sense carry on this discussion in Chapter 5 will give you a more Chapter 5 . For in India, sociology and social anthropology have had a very comprehensive account of these two traditions. close relationship. Reprint 2026-27