Author: Susan Visvanathan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 235
ISBN/UPC (if available): 978-0-19-565525-4
Description
This volume attempts to understand some of the key theoretical and empirical debates in the fields of urbanization, industrialization and stratification in India. The essays engage with the problem of typologies-tribal, peasant and industrial-in order to rethink the issues of modernity and tradition.
The authors problematize a vast array of literature on tribal, peasant and industrial sociology, grappling with conceptual problems related to the uncritical application of theories germinated in the West to India contexts. The primary assumption of all the essays is that the conventional binary opposition between primitive and modern, and the schema of the First, Second and Third worlds is redundant to our times. With this approach, the essays explore the tribal question, gender and the workplace, culture, change and colonial India, as well as issues in urban sociology.
The contributors to this volume do not propose a single solution to any of the problems but attempt to engage with the discursive and volatile aspects of the discipline of sociology, enlivening and reinvigorating old debates. It is hoped that through this exercise the student will come to read sociology in a new and refreshing way.
The contributors to this volume are teachers of sociology in different universities of India. Structure and Transformation is thus alive to the questions posed in classroom situations and will enrich the teaching of sociology in India. It is essential reading for students and teachers of sociology and anthropology, bureaucrats, administrators, social workers, journalists and the interested lay reader.