Social Organization study of Villages
- Structural Approach : Louis Dumont :Caste Hierarches : based on opposition of pure and Impure
- Functional Approach : W.H. Wiser, an American missionary, who lived in a U.P. village, Karimpur: The Hindu Jajimani System
- Structural – Functional Approach : M.N. Srinivas’s “The Dominant Caste in Ramapur”
A village Interaction with other folk and Urban Societies
- Opler’s Concept of Unity and Extensions : Through this concept Opler suggested that a village in India, irrespective of caste complexes and economic disparity, provides a homogeneous cultural unity, which is extended beyond the political boundary of a village through networks of matrimonial relations, kinship ties, economic transactions and inter-village fairs and festivals. Thus, the concept of unity and extensions, as depicted through the study of Indian village, throws light on the indigenous character of Indian civilization.
- Oscar Lewis, the American anthropologist > “rural cosmopolitanism”
- H.A Gould’s Concept of Centripetal and Centrifugal : “proletarianization (peasant village Sherupur, U.P)
- G.S. Ghurye : attempts to test the concept of folk urban continuum
Civilzational Studies
- Robert Redfield : little and great traditions”
- Mc Kim Marriott : “parochialisation and universalisation”
- F.G.Bailey : Tribe – Caste Continnum
Cultural Approaches studies Social Changes:
- M.N. Srinivas : Sanskritization and Westernization
- Modernization:
- Secularization : declining of social separation on the basis of Purity and Pollution
- Denocratization
- Globalization
H.A Gould’s Concept of Centripetal and Centrifugal : “proletarianization(peasant village Sherupur, U.P)
He argues that when a village in India is conceived as a self-contained entity to some extent, it may be called centripetal. However, when the activities of the village extend to outside the village specially to towns and markets, then it may be explained as centrifugal dimension of an Indian village. Thus, Gould’s concept of centripetal and centrifugal leads to explain refinement in the concept of unity and extension, earlier proposed by Morris Opler and Singh
Gould characterizes the self-contained and autonomous characteristics of a peasant village Sherupur, U.P. as centripetal and the dependency of the same on the urban centers as well as on the various processes of national culture as centrifugal. In the light of the data collec¬ted from the village, he also has coined a novel academic terminology “proletarianization” which means the process of absorbing lower caste people as labourers in industrial complexes as they are being defunctionalised in rural areas.