Seminar:- Concept Note

CONCEPT NOTE

 Introduction

It is by now well known that anthropologists and sociologists have for long  focused their studies of the tribal communities of India on their culture (sanskriti) comprised of ecology, food gathering, agriculture, arts, crafts, dance, music, language, folklore, magic, witchcraft, religion, festivals, and so on. On the other hand, studies of social structure (samaj) of the tribes have been relatively sidelined. In other words, we have lesser knowledge of their groups, classes and categories, such as family and marriage, lineage and clan, network of kinship and affinity, and the implications of these for other structures of society, especially their political structure. In 1962, Surajit Sinha initiated studies on the social structure of the tribals. Subsequently, by following this approach, a few more scholars have studied the tribals of eastern and central India. In western India, however, no detailed study of the social structure of tribes has been conducted, except The Bhils of Ratanmal by YVS Nath in 1960.

Introduction

Discourse on both the democracy and development in India denotes two contradictory points about their assessment, i.e., one, the democracy and development have succeeded; and, two these have failed. This applies to democracy and development when these are dealt with as interdependent or independent of each other i.e., whether they are compatible or not. This unit presents an overview of the assessment of democracy and development in India as two distinct phenomena and also in relation to each other.