E-Study | Kashmir

Maine was the one of the first to use notion of status and to distinguish between societies or social relations where one's position in the society is determined at birth and those in which one's position may depend upon one's actions during one's life time.
The functioning of societies depends upon the presence of patterns for reciprocal behavior between individuals or groups of individuals. The polar positions in such patterns of reciprocal behavior are known as statuses.
A status is a position in a particular pattern. The status of any individual means the sum total of all the statuses which he occupies. It represents his position with relation to the total society. Status and role serve to reduce the ideal patterns for social life to individual terms.
The majority of the statuses in all social systems are of ascribed type.
All societies prescribe different attitudes and activities to men and women. Most of them try to rationalize these prescriptions interms of the physiological difference between the sexes or their different roles in reproduction.
All societies recognize three age groupings as a minimum - child, adult and old. Certain societies have emphasized age as a basis for assigning status and have amplified the divisions.
In the case of age, the biological factors involved appear to be secondary to the cultural ones in determining the content of status.

Indus Valley Civilization is known mainly from two archeological sites of Harappa and Mohenjodaro. Other important sites are Chanu Daro, Kalibangan, Lothal, Amri and others. Harappa is situated on the banks of River Ravi at the distance of 160 kms from Lahore. Mohenjodaro is located in the Larkana district of Sind. It seemed to have flourished around 2500 BC. The most prominent feature is the citadel built of burnt brick on a hill on the western side of the city. There is also located a structure called Great Bath. It comprised of large rectangular pool. At each end were steps leading into the water and the base was made of neatly fitted bricks coated with pitch to make them watertight. At the foot of the citadel lay the workers quarters which were small houses of wood and mud on brick foundations divided into blocks by narrow streets. The more spacious residential quarters of the citizens lay to the east.
In Harappa granaries were massive structures. The warehouse consisted of 12 granaries arranged in two parallel rows and on each side of a wide central alley. The granaries were separated by further passages built for ventilation. The grain was stored in wooden silos which rested on giant platforms constructed of baked mud bricks. The cementary was located to the south of the citadel. The graves were laid with many articles such as copper rings, stone and shell necklaces and mirror made up of copper.
The cities depicted a very advanced system of town planning. Within the thick outer walls built a defence system against flooding were large blocks of houses separated by broad road laid out on a grid pattern. There was a drainage system following the routes of the streets with wells, brick gutters and draining wells.
The houses were terraced and varied in size and were designed round an inner courtyard some with upper floor approached by staircase. It was in the courtyard that animals were kept. The water supply for each home came from wells located in the courtyard. The houses were partitioned into several rooms one of which was a bathroom. Copper and bronze were the main metals and casting and forging were the metallurgical techniques common among the people. They have standardized weights and measures. It was based on binomial coupled with adecimal system.
Industry and commerce flourished in the Indus valley. The people engaged in trading with places as far as Mesopotamia. There is textual reference in Mesopotamia to show that the Indus people exported Carnelian, Copper, Ivory and Ebony. In turn, the Indus people imported Gold, Silver, Tin from Persia, lapislazuli from Afganistan. The indus people were thus engaged not only in inland trading but in overseas trading through navigation. In Lothal, a dockyard has been discovered.
Indus people had developed the art of writing evidences for which come from numerous square seals made of copper and clay engraved with signs. Similar signs are found on pottery and tools. Many of the signs are representations of animals or objects. The inscriptions remain to this day undeciphered.
Farming and agriculture was the main occupation of people. The agricultural surplus was stored in the granaries. The major crops were barley, wheat and cotton was grown and spun to be woven. Domesticated animals included buffalo, humped bull, goat, sheep, pig, fowl etc.
The Indus pottery is thick walled, wheel turned, kin fired and red with designs painted on in clay. Red ochre was used for painting. Geometric designs and floral designs were made for painting. Besides pottery, small terracotta toys of animal figures, carts were also found. Further bronze figurine of dancing girls were found. Beads, necklaces, bangles and other jewellery also have been discovered.

According to sociologists, people make linguistic masks as ways to refer to death without using the word itself. Instead of dead, we use the terms, for example "gone," "passed away," "no longer with us," or "at peace now." This perhaps helps in internalizing the sorrow and making the death more humane.
Blauner suggests that before industrialization, social and economic reasons made the lifespan of people short. It was common for the family to care of the sick at home, and the sick died at home. It was common for most children seeing a sibling or parent die or vice versa.
The 19th century with the Industrialization and subsequent modernization changed this aspect. As secondary groups came to dominate society, the process of dying was placed in the hands of professionals in hospitals. Dying now started taking place behind closed doors managed by strangers.
According to Cerulo and Ruane not only did new technologies remove the dying from our presence, but they also created technological life-form of existence that lies between life and death. The "brain dead" in hospitals through technology keeps the body alive. This muddles the boundary between life and death, which used to seem so certain.
Psychologist Elisabeth Kler-Ross studied how people cope during the living-dying interval, that period between discovering they are going to die soon and death itself. After interviewing people who had been informed that they had an incurable disease, she concluded that people who come face to face with their own death go through five stages:
1. Denial: At first, people cannot believe that they are going to die. They avoid the topic of death and situations that remind them of it.
2. Anger: After a while, they acknowledge that they are going to die, but they view their death as unjust.
3. Negotiation: The individual tries to get around death by making a bargain with God, with fate, or even with the disease itself.
4. Depression: During this stage, people become resigned to their death, but they grieve because their life is about to end, and they have no power to change the course of events.
5. Acceptance: In this final stage, people come to terms with their impending death. They also express regret at not having done certain things when they had the chance.
Sociologically, death is a process, not just an event. People who expect to die soon face a reality quite different from the one experienced by those of us who expect to be alive years from now. Their impending death powerfully affects their thinking and behavior.
Today, we take it for granted that most people will see old age. Due to advances in medical technology and better public health practices, most deaths usually occur after age 65. People want to die with dignity, in the comforting presence of friends and relatives. There people experience what sociologists call institutional death surrounded by strangers in formal garb, in sterile rooms filled with machines, in an organization that puts its routines ahead of patients' needs.
Hospices emerged as a way to reduce the emotional and physical burden of dying and to lower the costs of death. Hospice care is built around the idea that the people who are dying and their families should control the process of dying. The term hospice originally referred to a place, but now it generally refers to home care. Hospice care is dedicated to providing dignity in death and making people comfortable during the living-dying interval.
People experience different kind of emotions after the death of a loved one. Along with grief and loneliness, they may feel guilt, anger, or even relief .The period of mourning allows the family members to come to terms with the death. They also reorganize their family system to deal with the absence of the person who was so important to it.
When death is expected, family members find it less stressful as they have begun to cope with the coming death by managing a series of smaller losses, including the person's inability to fulfill his or her usual roles or to do specific tasks. In contrast, unexpected deaths like accidents, suicides, and murders bring greater emotional shock. The family members have had no time to get used to the idea that the individual is going to die.
Credit:James M Henslin (SOCIOLOGY - A Down to Earth Approach)

Polygamy is plural marriage including Polygyny which is the marriage of one man to several women and Polyandry which is the marriage of one woman to several men.
Different factors in different societies have bearing on the practice of Polygyny. In societies in which women are economically important, Polygyny favours increase in man's wealth and consequent social position. In ancient and medieval India, many rulers married women from different clans and villages to strengthen their political, social and economic position.
Polygyny is characteristically found in societies with high productivity where agriculture is labour intensive and so additional women in the household is an advantage. Even in societies in which Polygyny is defined few men have more than one wife.
In Sororal Polygyny, a man marries sisters who may cooperate and get along without creating family discord.
Polyandry has been recorded in parts of Tibet and among the Todas and Paharis in India. Polyandry may be an adaption arising out of shortage of women in some societies. The shortage may be due to female infanticide. In societies where men may have to be away from home for long spells of time a woman with more than a husband is assured of protection and help. Fraternal Polyandry recorded in the Toda tribes in the Nilgiri hills, South India is a system according to which a woman marries brothers. Usually the eldest brother becomes the legal father to the child born to the woman. Occasionally, a woman may marry men who are not biologically brothers. Todas have become largely monogamous.

Symbolism is seen in the ritual behaviour of religion. In religious studies, ritual is being examined as a statement or a document of social organization or an expression of non rational imperatives in human action.
Looked from the symbolic inside out, ritual can be seen as a symbolic intercom between the level of cultural thought and complex cultural meanings on the one hand and that of social action and immediate event on the other.
It commands a intrinsic value of real utilities' matrixes in diffuse social contexts which it symbolically manipulates in transactions freed from the apatio-temporal determinants of these contexts. The medium is thus generalized in its capacity to convert any utility within a relevant domain or category of value that circulates between actors at a new symbolic level of social interaction.
The basis for a social theory of symbolic action was laid by N D Fustel De Coulanges in his study La Cite Antique which appeared in 1864. For him, certain rituals of ancient Greece and Rome functioned and sustained corporate identity of social groups.
We can see in his approach, the recognition basic to any social theory of symbolism that certain material forms and modes of organizing physical space carry messages relating to the organization of social space; regulation of behaviour in the concrete sphere of social action can express and regulate relationships in the sphere of social structure.
Since social groups are constituted by conformity to cultural rules embodied in symbolic action rather than by natural association or natural affection, the grounds of social order must be continuously recreated through common ritual activities. Social bonds and the structure of social units have to be perpetually reinstated in individual experience within a social process that symbolizes these bonds.
Fustel states that these old customs give us an idea of the closeness which united the members of the city. Human association was a religion; it's symbol was a meal... Neither interest nor agreement nor habit creates the social bond; it is the holy communion. The ritual maintenance of social bonds requires a particular mode of individual orientation towards society one where the individual conscience is lodged within external social forms that govern it compelling it from without almost like a material bond.
In his view these traditional human societies developed a mode of social control involving the projection of the individual conscience into external symbolic forms that in turn functioned to express sociopolitical relationship.

In economics, the difference between the total amount consumers would be willing to pay to consume the quantity of goods transacted on the market and the amount they actually have to pay for those goods. The former is generally interpreted as the monetary value of consumer satisfaction.
The concept was developed in 1844 by the French civil engineer Arsène-Jules-Étienne-Juvénal Dupuit (1804 - 1866) and popularized by Alfred Marshall. Though economists adopted a non-quantifiable approach to consumer satisfaction in the 20th century, the concept is used extensively in the fields of welfare economics and taxation.

The Revolution of 1848 of France as the result of the corrupt misrule of the constitutional monarchy led by Louis Phillpe. The rule of Louis Philippe rested on unholy alliance between the monarchist and the bourgeois. These groups used the state powers to fulfil their vested interests and this led the wages and aspirations of peasants, labourers and other low classes were neglected. The misrule of this bourgeois class supported by constitutional monarchy produced resentment among the peasants and laboures. The social base of the constitutional monarchy became narrower with passage of time.
During 30s and 40s the Republicans and Socialists spread their wings among the peasants and lower classes. The Republicans wanted the end of constitutional monarchy and declaration of France as Republican State. The socialists were looking for the end of the exploitation caused by bourgeois and egalitarian distribution of state resources. The reform demands by the lower classes were continuously neglected by the bourgeois class. The common masses were looking for the extension of Franchise and natural rights. When these demands were neglected by Louis Philippe the prevailing discontent of the masses erupted in the form of revolution of 1848.
The Revolution of 1848 was inspired by the principle of liberalism. The revolution was against the prevailing monarchical orders. It was also inspired by the ideals of socialism. By this time the influence of socialism had become quite evident in France and they began to represent the aspirations of the lower classes and peasants.
Like the Revolution of 1830 this Revolution was also against the Vienna Order of 1815 as it was against the popular aspirations. It was the revolution of common masses dominated by the lower classes and peasantry. It was political and economic in the character as the revolutionaries were dissatisfied by the existing political, economic order prevalent in the society.
The revolution of 1848 enjoys a place of great significance both in France and European history. The constitutional monarchy of Orleans dynasty was abolished and France was declared a sovereign Republic state. Universal adult franchise was also implemented in France. The forces of nationalism and socialism gained ground in France and process of labour reforms was initiated. In this way, the Revolution of 1848 marked the completion of the process started by the Revolution of 1789. It provided stability to the institution of ideals based on liberty, equality, sovereighty and rule of law in France.
The revolutionaries of Hungary succeeded in extracting a liberal constitution. Switzerland was also declared republic state. The popular revolt in Vienna led to the downfall of Metternich. When the echo of the Revolution of 1848 found expression in Vienna, Metternich was terrified and he escaped to Britain. The fall of Metternich inspired the supporters of unified process of Italy and Germany. The German nationalists summoned Frankfurt Parliament and crown of unified German Empire was offered to Prussian King Frederick William IV. But this monarch refused to accept this crown and hopes of German nationalists were dashed.
The Italian nationalists also attempted to unify the politically fragmented Italy under leadership of the states of Piedmont Sardnia. The revolution of 1848 also succeeded in wiping out the elements of feudalism from Europe. The privileges and serfdom were abolished from whole of Europe. The success of Revolution in France inspired the labour movements throughout Europe and labour problems started receiving greater attention in European polity. It strengthened the nationalistic forces in Europe though they were defeated in Italy and Germany but they could not be uprooted completely.