When sociology-anthropology reached the non-Western world, the expatriate researchers studying primitive societies and non-Western civilizations focused their attention more on finding the differences between the West and the non-West. Implicit in their quest was the hypothesis that these non-Western societies represent stages lower than Western civilization. With this assumption, they devoted their time and attention in meticulous descriptions of their prevailing structure, as if they were reconstructing their own past!
Not much of the past of primitive societies could be constructed because these studies were handicapped by the absence of any written records relative to these preliterate societies. Therefore, unlike the historical approach, which moves from the remote past to the present, the anthropological reconstruction of past of the tribal societies began from the present and went backwards as far as the memory of the informants could take them. As a result, ethnographic studies increasingly described the societies in the idiom of the eternal present, as if these societies continue to exist without change. This encouraged those who were still interested in describing the evolution of modern society to treat these societies as representative of the earlier pattern, as ‘vestiges’, ‘social relics’ or ‘cultural fossils’. While these were disputed by later scholars, such studies did provide some paradigms for the study of social and cultural change.
Theoretically oriented anthropologists continued to follow the historical approach to build grand theories of societal change. Such scholars did not focus on this or that society, but took elements from different societies to chart out their theories of continuum—a variant of evolutionism.
The most popular construct was that of Robert Redfield, who analysed the transformations of the Primitive World in the framework of folk-urban continuum. This was developed in a seminal paper authored by Redfield and Milton Singer (1954), titled ‘The Cultural Role of the Cities’. One end of the continuum consisted of the Folk society (as an Ideal Type), which was regarded as a small, long-established, homogeneous, and preliterate community. The City, on the other end of the continuum, was conceived by the authors as a fully transformed folk society through both orthogenetic (from within) and heterogenetic (from varied external sources) forces of change. According to the authors, the orthogenetic forces result in the development of a ‘Great Tradition’ that is derived from its literati and intellectual class, and draws from the moral and religious life of the community. Even the advanced economic institutions remain obedient to local cultural transformations. The heterogenetic forces—bringing the influence from abroad—contribute to ‘the freeing of the intellectual, aesthetic, economic, and political life from the local moral norms’; these develop ‘on the one hand, an individuated ex-pediential motivation, and on the other, a revolutionary, nativistic, humanistic or ecumenical viewpoint, now directed toward reform, progress and designed change’.
In this context, Redfield and Singer talk of Primary and Secondary Urbanization.
Primary Urbanization occurs, according to them, mostly in the framework of orthogenetic transformations, maintaining its core culture and thus giving rise to an Indigenous civilization. In this process, the pre-civilized folk society is transformed into a peasant society which gets linked to new urban centres. The process first produces a sacred culture, which is gradually shaped by the urban literati into a Great Tradition.
Secondary Urbanization occurs when the folk society comes in contact with people of widely different cultures. This involves conflict with traditions and results in new accommodative structures. Secondary urbanization produces states of mind that are not congruent with local culture, and are supportive of a technical order.
In their study of Indian society, students of Redfield followed this approach and regarded India as an indigenous civilization. This was, however, disputed by many because the fact of contact with the outside world with regard to India is not new and the heterogeneity, even in terms of religion, is so evident. An Indian society cannot be called a Hindu society; followers of other religions, such as Islam and Christianity, constitute a significant number. In addition, Hinduism itself is described as ‘a way of life’ rather than a religion in the narrow sense of the term. But followers of the Redfield model in the context of India talked of indigenous civilization in the restricted sense and equated the Great Tradition with the Hindu Tradition.
The same path was followed by the earlier genre of social scientists in India, better known as Indologists, both native and alien. They prepared the profiles of Indian society on the basis of old scriptures. Such profiles faltered on two counts: (i) the composite character of Indian society was ignored and Indian society became synonymous with Hindu society; and (ii) the prescriptive character of the texts was mistaken for descriptive reality, and the writings gave the impression that those depictions hold true for the present—a tradition-bound society was regarded as unchanging. In the field of Indology, debates did take place on the interpretation of the texts, particularly by Western scholarship. B. K. Sarkar is proclaimed as a sociologist on the grounds that as a nationalist, he challenged the interpretations of Indian society made by Western scholars.5
Interestingly enough, those students who wanted to demonstrate change in the Indian society to refute the allegation that the tradition-bound society of India was unchanging compared the present reality with the old prescriptions. They regarded deviations from the norms as indicators of change. This argument could not be sustained as it was methodologically unsound.
The empirically oriented scholars challenged that interpretation. They argued that a comparison of Ideal with the Real cannot provide dependable inference about change. It is only indicative of the deviation/departure from the norm, but whether such deviation was new, and whether in the past people closely adhered to the norm, is a matter of sheer speculation.
A prescription cannot be taken as a description of the past. It is in this sense that Manu‘s prescriptions cannot be regarded as dependable evidence of their being followed. Some have suggested that it is not the prescriptions (the command for the Dos), but the proscriptions (the command for Don‘ts) that may provide some indications for the prevalence of a practice. The argument runs as follows: When you disallow something, it can be presumed that such a practice was in vogue, but when you ask someone to do something, it cannot be presumed that it was a command to continue the practice; it may as well be a newly introduced feature which may, or may not, be followed. Thus, the prescriptions cannot be taken as sure evidence of a prevailing practice. Manu’s Smriti is a set of prescriptions, and not a dependable evidence of the prevalence of practices. This point is generally missed. As a result, Manu is criticized by those who oppose his prescriptions, and hailed by those who unwittingly accept them as religiously ordained items. Manu Smriti is not a sociological document; of course, it is sociologically relevant.
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