CHAPTER 3

Defining Society?

If one were to ask anyone about the subject matter of sociology, the most likely response would be that it is the study of society. The more sophisticated respondents may further generalize and say that it studies the ‘social’ or the ‘social sphere’, or the sociosphere, contrasting it with the biosphere or the atmosphere.^1. However, not many people are clear as to what society is, or what social or sociosphere is. There are others who define sociology as a study of groups—society is also a group, according to them, covered by this broad definition.

Due to its various connotations, there is a need for a systematic definition of the three key words relative to sociology, namely, social, society, and group.

In this chapter, we shall develop the concept of society as a special type of group. In the next chapter we shall discuss in detail the more general concept of ‘group’. We could have done it the other way around. The reader can either follow this sequence or go first to the next chapter and return to this one later.

The Term Sociosphere

The term sociosphere is much broader and all-encompassing. It means the entire range of social interactions, beginning with the casual meeting of two individuals to more formal rendezvous between individuals, between individuals and groups, between groups within a society, and between societies. Social formations beyond societal/national boundaries are regarded as ‘epigenetic’—built over the normal body²—but they are also covered as part of the ‘sociosphere’. Sociology deals with the entire range of social formations and social interactions, both within a society and between societies. It is in this broader sense that sociology can be called the study of the sociosphere.

It must, however, be remembered that sociosphere is not coterminous with society; it is much larger and covers the entire gamut of social interactions and groups, both within society and across societies.

Social Interactions

There are three ways to act and interact:

1. A person can act independently, following his/her own way without giving any thought to his fellows or their actions;
2. He/she may seek his ends through conflict with one another; and
3. Men may pursue their ends on a cooperative basis, in the company of others and taking care of the other partners’ feelings and needs. Such cooperation can be (i) spontaneous, (ii) casual, (iii) based on customs and practices (that is, traditions), or (iv) be properly organized. People with identical goals may organize themselves expressly to pursue these goals in a mutually agreed manner.

The first type of action is obviously a non-social action. The second path of conflict is not only wasteful, but also precarious, and a threat to community living. It is the third option that makes for living together. Any group, including society, is able to survive by curbing the first two types of human action. For social living, every member has to sacrifice her/his personal interests for the wider public good. Also, every social system has to evolve mechanisms to control—that is, limit and regulate—conflict.

The key characteristic of all interactional fields, it may be noted, is that they are ‘social’. However, social interaction can be in the nature of a conflict or of cooperation. Since both conflict and cooperation occur as part of social action, both are part of the subject matter of sociology. A war or a communal riot is as much a sociological subject as a cooperative endeavour.

‘Humans’ are distinguished from infra-human beings, that is, lower-level animals on this basis. While all animal behaviour is instinctive—although they also have some capability to learn and retain what they have learnt—most human behaviour is learnt. And learning requires interaction. This is not to deny, again, the presence of instinct among humans. But humans are termed social in the sense that they cannot live in isolation. They need the company of other humans. This company may be as small as two individuals or as large as several individuals. And it is such interactions that are social. This field of the ‘social’ is broad enough to include interactions in various domains—economic, political, religious, legal, recreational, etc.

Interactions occur in various types of assemblages in which people transact their businesses. These could be transient relationships or permanent ones.

A meeting of two strangers in a street, patron–client relationships—such as the relationship between a doctor and a patient, a shopper and shopkeeper, passengers in a bus—are all examples of transient relationships. Often in such situations, one of the parties dons a permanent status—as doctor, shopkeeper, bus conductor, etc.—while the other party temporarily occupies the status of counterpart. An individual also enters into interactions in the capacity of a member in several well-defined groups. Additionally, an individual participates in several complex networks of individuals or groups.

The larger the society, the more complex is the field of interactions. While individuals change, the pattern of these interactions in a given society remains more or less stable. It is these stable aspects that constitute a society’s social structure, which makes the behaviour of a society’s members predictable.

To explain this point, we narrate an imagined story of a person’s daily routine.

A person, a man, aged around 40, wakes up at 6:00 AM to answer a door bell. He opens the door, to be greeted by a milkman. Meanwhile, his wife goes to the kitchen to make tea for him and for his mother. Their child aged 10 is woken up to go to school. A phone call is attended; it is the neighbour calling to see whether our hero can take the caller’s son in his car to school. Another call comes from an unknown entity, on behalf of a company seeking private investment, to which an angry denial is given. The man gets ready, has his breakfast, and then leaves with his son, picks up the neighbour’s child, and then drives to the school to drop the two kids.

While returning from the school and taking the road to his office in a hurry, he jumps a red light and is stopped by a policeman. An argument ensues and traffic is halted. Curious onlookers come to the site of confrontation. They soon disburse. And our hero heads towards his place of work somewhat late. His colleagues enquire about the cause of delay, and the head of the office seeks an explanation. Our man then phones a friend to find out whether the latter knows any person who can help save him from prosecution by the police. The friend refers him to another person, who is then contacted. That person promises to help and then asks him to go to the police department to contact Mr X, a distant relative of the former. In the afternoon, our hero takes time off and visits the referred person, who gets him acquitted.

We notice that in the short span of the day, our hero has come in contact with:

1. a milkman (a known relationship limited to a single transaction every day; for the milkman, our hero is one of the many clients served daily; while these clients may or may not know each other, they all form part of his circle of interaction in his capacity as milkman);
2. his wife, mother, and son: all members of his immediate family;
3. a neighbour who calls him on the phone;
4. an unknown caller representing some company that regards him as a potential customer;
5. his son’s school—the son is a member of this group, but he himself is a non-member. Of course, as a parent, he might be a member of the Parent–Teachers’ Association;
6. a traffic policeman, where he is confronted in his capacity as a driver of a vehicle;
7. a spontaneous gathering of people, called a crowd;
8. his colleagues and boss at his place of work—a group to which he belongs in his capacity as an employee;
9. a friend with whom he talks on the phone;
10. a hitherto unknown person, a friend of a friend; and
11. a person in the police department, a relative of a friend’s friend.

All the above situations are social situations of interaction, involving either individuals in specific roles; or groups to which our hero may or may not belong; or collections of people assembled for a limited purpose. Then there were instances of networking arrangements: the unknown caller from the company must have obtained our hero’s phone number through his/ her network; similarly, it is via the friendship network that our hero succeeded in ‘getting his work done’ in the police department.

A proper understanding of a social situation requires coverage of this entire area of social interaction. Since most of these interactions occur within the society of which an individual is a member, the study of society includes all these structural dimensions.

With regard to sociology as a general science, Robert Bierstedt clarifies the point with the help of a formula he borrowed from Pitirim A. Sorokin (1948: 7).

To quote Bierstedt:

… it seems fairly clear that social relationships and social interactions between people occur in all the affairs of human life, whether these affairs are primarily economic or political or religious or recreational or legal or intellectual, and that there is no separate category of the social apart from all these others, except those relations of ‘polite acquaintance’ that are called social in a narrower sense. In other words, sociology studies those phenomena that are common to all human interaction (1963: 15).

In the following formula, a, b, and c represent the common core, and other variables represented by other letters of the alphabet signify the specific domain:

Economic	a,b,c, d,e,f
Political	a,b,c, g,h,i
Religious	a,b,c, j,k,l
Legal	a,b,c, m,n,o
Recreational	a,b,c, p,q,r

Diagrammatically (see Figure 3.1), it can be shown thus:

Forgetting for the time being the supra-societal phenomena which also come within the scope of sociology, let us concentrate on society as the all-encompassing entity in which people live, and with which they identify.

The word society is used in several senses:

1. For the entire human society;
2. for the people living in a country with a common government;
3. for geographically defined communities such as cities and villages;
4. for specific ethnic groups living closely in separate settlements but in a distinct geographical area, belonging to a wider national entity;
5. for a group of people tracing a common origin but widely scattered either in the same locality, or in different locations; and even
6. for associations such as Indian Sociological Society³ [ISS].

When it is said that sociology studies society, it means both society as a whole and the various components of society, that is, the ‘structures’, as also their ‘functions’ and the processes that make society a living and changing entity.

 

Figure 3.1  Different Dimensions of the Social Domain

Society is a generic term. The definition accorded to it should be such that it is applicable to all kinds of societies—big or small, modern or primitive, western or eastern, monocultural or pluricultural. At a lower level of generality, we may talk of Indian society or Thai society; at a slightly higher level, we can speak of a tribal society, or of a developing society. Referring to human society as a whole takes it to a still higher level, but this reference is more allegorical, used for the species as a whole and not for real societies. It refers to the entire humanity that lives in different societies. It may also mean that we are talking of the society constituted by humans and not by infra-human animals such as the society among ants, or among apes. Thus, the prefix ‘human’ is only a specifier. Kingsley Davis’ textbook on sociology is, in this sense, titled Human Society; it focuses on the structure and functions of society rather than on humanity as such.

Similarly, at a specific empirical level, say within the Indian society, we may even refer to a Bengali or Rajasthani, or Goan society, but these designations are used to define the group in terms of a region that is part of the Indian nation. As such, they are technically subsets of Indian society distinguished by some additional characteristics—for example, language, dressing pattern, food habits, and geography—which gives them a distinct identity for a more refined identification within the ambit of Indian society. The traits that give them this distinct identity are peculiar only to the people of the specified area (Bengal, Rajasthan, or Goa), and are not shared by residents of other regions; however, these subsets also share traits that are common to the Indian nation as a whole. Thus, the important point to remember is that the units in question possess the general characteristic of the social formation called society, and the specific attributes indicated in the prefix are additional features that give it an easy and more specific regional identity. The ‘add-ons’ are the specifying features, distinct from the core characteristics. It is the core characteristics that define the boundary of a society.

How, then, do we define society? There are two ways of doing this. One, we have a notion of a society that we formalize and say that any group corresponding to those characteristics would be designated a society. The other way is to see some concrete groups that we regard as societies and cull out the similarities and differences in them, and constitute a construct of that social formation in terms of the common minimum characteristics.

Let us follow the second approach, which in logic is termed the inductive approach, as against the deductive approach (see Box 3.1). In other words, rather than building a logical construct, we shall observe the concrete cases and try to derive the key elements.

 

 

Consider, for example, the Indian society. What features can we identify to describe India as a society?

The prefix ‘Indian’ states that we are talking of a social entity located in a geographical space called India. Until 15 August 1947, this space was broader than it is today, because with the attainment of independence from British rule, the country constituting a single society—and the one that struggled for freedom—was partitioned into two countries, Pakistan and India. The larger, multi-religious, and multi-cultural entity retained the original name, and the breakaway group called itself Pakistan, which had two wings—eastern and western, separated from one another by the huge Indian corridor. In due course of time, the two wings of the newly created nation fell apart, the polity failing in its attempt to forge a single society. Thus, the two wings of the breakaway group became two different nations: Pakistan and Bangladesh, representing two different cultural zones despite sharing a common religion. In this manner, what was one society in pre-partition days became three societies. And the new societies faced a crisis of identity soon upon their creation. Even the residual India had to redefine its identity mainly in territorial terms.

Historically, one can go back and make a distinction between the regional regimes ruled over by Maharajas and Nawabs, and the areas directly governed by the British. Analysts talked of a single society ruled by different political masters. The point emphasized in such enumerations is that for a society to exist, it is not necessary to have a single religion: people following the same religion may belong to different societies and, conversely, people of different religions may form part of a single society. The India of pre-Mughal and pre-British days united people through a common Hindu civilization, but divided them in terms of political regimes. Thus, the people of this subcontinent, who shared a common religion and the associated philosophy and mythology, were ruled by different dynasties. Their social, political, and economic interactions were mostly confined to the area under a common ruler. Through wars and victories, these boundaries constantly changed, as language, dressing patterns, and other aspects of material culture provided the people with distinct regional identities. The Mughal emperors tried to forge a supra-regional regime, making the distinction between a Raja (king) and Badshah (Emperor or Samrat).⁴ The same process continued during British rule. The boundaries of the real, functioning societies during these times corresponded with the territories of the princely states, for example, Mewar, Marwar, Patiala, Junagarh, Kashmir, etc. Despite a common indigenous civilizational link, these states were different societies in terms of their areas of social interaction (see Atal, 1981: 244–45). That is why when the British left the country in 1947, each of the princely states had to individually secede to the Indian Union. This brought to an end the era of regional regimes and led to the construction of an all-India society. All efforts at nation-building and national integration made after the attainment of independence were attempts to break the regional insulations by opening out apertures⁵ and creating a broader multi-cultural society, that is, India.

The subcontinent is now divided into three societies, each with a separate political system. On the west is the state of Pakistan, and on the east, the state of Bangladesh. How do we draw the boundaries? How do we distinguish them from the core from which they have seceded?

Those who propounded the two-nation theory—that Hindus and Muslims constitute two nations as they practise two different religions—made religion the key distinguishing feature of a society. However, as we have seen, Pakistan broke into two even after the two wings of the newly formed state had proclaimed religion as the basis of the new nation. And India, after partition, remained a multi-religious country with practitioners of Islam representing around 13 per cent of the population of independent India, which in real numerical terms was larger than the size of Pakistan! So while Pakistan had ‘religion’ as its organizing principle, the same was not true of India. Also, even in Pakistan there remained sections of population that belonged to other religions, namely, Hindus, Christians, and Parsees. To be sure, neither the Hindu religion nor Islam is homogeneous: if there are different sects amongst the Hindus, the Muslims are also divided into Shias and Sunnis, and into some other smaller sects like the Ahmedia. It also emerges that a new society may be found with different baselines, religion being only one of them; a common political entity is another. Original social formations had the basis of birth, or ethnicity, and shared a common habitat. Whatever might be the basis of a group formation, it takes the features of a society when other features are added to it to make it a self-sustaining and self-perpetuating entity.

It then seems that the main distinguishing feature of these societies of the Indian subcontinent is the geographical location with clear-cut boundaries, forgetting for the moment about certain disputed areas between Pakistan and India. These societies occupy a well-defined geographical territory. This is the first essential characteristic of a society.

The second characteristic is that all these territories are populated by persons of both sexes, and a distinction is made between their residents in terms of membership. Members are distinguished from non-members; in official terms they are designated as citizens and foreigners, respectively. Foreigners can convert their status into citizens through a process of naturalization. Upon the partition of the country, there was a movement of people across borders, and these people were initially called refugees—Sharanarthi or Purusharthi in India and Mujhahir in Pakistan. They were later assimilated as full citizens. The population composition of each country is, thus, affected by the demographic factors of birth and death, and immigration and emigration. The arrival of new members is caused through birth or immigration, and departure by death or emigration. The point to remember is that a society perpetuates itself by ensuring its continuing membership through sexual reproduction. The population of a society at any given point in time is expressed through this simple demographic formula:

 

where P = Population; pi = Population at previous reference point; b = Birth; i = Immigration; d = Death; e = Emigration

 

Third, the actions of the members of society are oriented towards the society and are expressed in terms of belongingness and loyalty.

Fourth, society maintains itself by making provisions for the fulfilment of its members’ needs—biological or basic, social and cultural. It also provides mechanisms for keeping itself integrated. And it exists as an independent entity.

A society has a longer—literally, almost unending—life while its individual members have a limited life span.

From the case of the Indian subcontinent, another feature that can be culled out at a higher level of generality is that each society has its own cultural identity. Newly created societies face a crisis of identity and attempt to resolve it.

If we were to see smaller societies, typically tribal societies, which once were called primitive societies, we could add more features to this definition. For example, we can talk of such societies as practising a common religion (or a semblance of it, in terms of ‘handling the supernatural’), speaking a common language or a dialect, observing a distinctive style of dress, and even having an undifferentiated economy (hunting and food-gathering, shifting cultivation, etc). Thus, one can say that every society has institutions and mechanisms to meet the spiritual and economic needs of its members, though their specificities vary from case to case. These are sufficiently relevant, but not the core characteristics of a society.

To clarify this point, let us return to the partition story. Despite the same religion, the split between the two wings of erstwhile Pakistan was caused by geographical discontinuity (see Jahan, 1972)—the two wings were separated by a long Indian corridor. The geographical gap created a psychological distance, which was further reinforced by the linguistic barrier. While Urdu was proclaimed the national language of Pakistan, the people of the eastern wing spoke Bengali. Thus, language-wise, the people of Eastern Pakistan were closer to the people of West Bengal. The people of Western Punjab (now part of Pakistan) were, and are, linguistically proximate to Indians of Eastern Punjab as both speak Punjabi; interestingly, people on both sides write Punjabi in the Urdu script, despite the existence and use of a separate Gurumukhi script—a variant of Devnagari—for Punjabi. The breakdown of Pakistan brought to the fore the fact that it was not religion, but language—Urdu for Pakistan and Bengali for Bangladesh—that was the key unifying feature for establishing cultural identity. But, as we said earlier, this had its own problems. Punjabis in both India and Pakistan speak Punjabi and share many cultural features; similarly, Bengalis in India and Bangladesh speak Bengali and share many cultural features. Language, therefore, is not bound by religion. Urdu is spoken not only by Muslims, but also by several non-Muslims. So is the case with Bengali or Hindi or English.⁶ It is interesting to note that the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh were written by the poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Bangli is rich in its literary heritage, and therefore its literature is read by the intelligentsia on both sides of the border. In order to create a distinct identity, Bangladesh was faced with the crisis of a common language. Thus, while retaining the Bengali script and diction and relishing its rich literature, Bangladesh has accommodated several words from Arabic and Persian in its lingua franca to create a cultural distance from West Bengal; and of course Rabindra Sangeet is being replaced by Nazrul Geeti.

The country’s partition also created a certain crisis of identity in India. In the initial years of India’s independence, a good deal of attention went into handling the crisis of nation-building, which included the question of creating a distinctive cultural identity. The leadership emphasized the point that Indian society was not coterminous with Hindu society. The Indian social system was not the same as the Hindu social system, which was characterized by the ‘much despised and decried’ caste system as decreed by sages like Manu. This was not to deny the existence of the Hindu faith or to undermine the majority of its followers, but to insist on free India’s secular character, and to take effective steps to ensure national integration and speed up the process of nation-building.

The crisis of cultural identity still bogs all three societies. The point to remember is that each society has a culture of its own.

To sum up: we can say that a society is a territorial group of people of both sexes, and its new membership is mostly the product of sexual reproduction within its fold. It has a life span that is longer than that of its individual members. It is a self-perpetuating entity that looks after all the needs of its members. The members identify themselves with it in the sense that their actions are oriented towards it, and their lives influenced by the culture of the society.

The above summarization of the key characteristics of society carries with it the entire range of topics that constitute the subject matter of sociology. Let us spell them out here:

1. Geographical location and territory: This aspect refers to the environmental and habitat aspects of society. The economy of the society is dependent upon the ecology, as are issues relative to transportation and communication.
2. Heterosexual composition: It refers to the demographic composition. Only a group that is heterosexual can qualify as a society; however, not all heterosexual groups are societies. Since membership is mostly by birth, this point refers to heterosexual interactions between its members, regulated by group norms of eligibility for sexual partnership. Where no such rules exist, a society is termed promiscuous, or one that permits group marriage. Since a society is an in-marrying group—technically called endogamous—the population composition will suggest the presence of different age groups, from infants to senior citizens. Thus, a society is not only heterosexual, it is also stratified by age. This feature differentiates a society from other groups that permit membership of both the sexes, but not for purposes of conjugal union; even the family is different because it has to bring in sexual partners from the outside, and also send out some of its members to other families for sexual reproduction. Similarly, a club or a political party has as its members both sexes, but their interactions, in the context of these groups, are not supposed to be conjugal. The fact that preference may be given in a club to children of the present members does not make them identical to a society, where birth in the group is the principal basis for membership. It is in this sense that institutions associated with the production of new membership form a crucial part of the study of society. These institutions are covered by the oft-used phrase rites de passage or rites of passage: birth, initiation, marriage, and death. Marriage, family, kinship, and socialization thus form essential components of the study of society.
3. Longer life-span: A society has a much longer life span than any of its members. A society usually does not die unless some calamity—such as an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, or devastation by war or spread of an epidemic—wipes out the entire society or a part of it. It is possible that a society might be submerged within a larger entity and become a sub-set. Birth and death change the profiles of people occupying different positions in a society, but the positions do not disappear with the death of the position holders. Positions, technically called statuses, and the activities associated with them—called roles—are occupied by others when the previous status holders die or retire. Thus, the system continues to function. Men are mortal; structures are long enduring.
4. Self-perpetuating and self-sufficient: Not only are societies self-dependent, in that their membership continues to be renewed—the death of present members compensated by the birth of new members—they also provide mechanisms to meet the basic needs of its members—food, health, shelter, etc. When a society loses this self-sufficiency, it ceases to be a society. It may be noted that a society may continue to exist even when it is dependent for part of its needs on others, provided the decision to seek assistance rests with it.
5. Self-governance/Autonomy: A society exercises independence in governance, as it has its own political system, including law and order and the system of social control. When it is subjugated by any power from the outside, its character undergoes a change. A conquest by an invader affects its autonomy. Such an interaction begins with confrontation, but conquest leads to processes of accommodation and assimilation, which incorporate outside elements within the core of the conquered society. Such a process transforms the society’s culture, making it pluri-cultural and ultimately generating a broader cultural fabric integrating various components of the emergent profile. A colonial society, on the other hand, represents a ‘subject political culture’ in which the cultural elements of the ruling colonial masters impinge on the indigenous, and bring about significant changes both in the material culture and in value profiles. However, the society does not become part of the society of the colonial masters; it becomes part of the set of colonial societies ruled over by the same colonial ruler, while retaining its societal identity.
6. Changing character: Inherent in the above characterization is the point that a living society is not a static society. It is constantly subject to change. Besides the demographic changes caused by birth, death, and migration, societies also experience changes in their economy, religion, and polity. These changes may come from within (endogenous)or from without (exogenous).A student of society, therefore, studies both structures and functions and the processes that bring about social change.

The structure of society consists of various groups within the society. An individual, as a member of the society, relates himself/herself with a number of groups. ‘Man’s life is to an enormous extent a group life. He not only lives in groups, but he also develops a variety of verbal symbols with which to identify them’ (McIver and Page, 1955: 213). Aristotle described Man as a social animal (zoon politikon). By nature, Man is gregarious, and thus seeks company. A human child is so hopelessly dependent that it would not survive if left alone. There are stories of ‘wolf-boys’; these abandoned children could survive in jungles because they were looked after by wolves, and, living in their company, learnt the mannerism of their surrogates!

An individual relates himself/herself with others either territorially, or in terms of social relationships. Thus, the structure of a society consists of territorial groupings and social affiliations. From the point of view of an individual, a society is structured along these dimensions. Thus, an individual belongs territorially to a home, a neighbourhood (mohalla), village or city, block, district, division, state and country. At the same time, s/he relates with the family of birth, extended family, lineage, clan, caste (in case one is a member of a caste society), a varna (a well-defined cluster of castes),⁷ and religion (the followers of which may be found in several countries).

It is evident that territorial groupings are used for purposes of administration, and that they constitute a hierarchy from the local level up to the country as a whole (see Figure 3.2). Also, a territorial group demonstrates a cultural distinctiveness. People of a given area speak the same language/dialect, have a common style of dress, food habits, and a tradition of material culture. The specific cultural or environmental features of the region or sub-region are shared by all people living in that territory. Thus, territorial affiliation cuts across family, caste, or religious boundaries. On the other hand, an individual’s social affiliations based on his ascriptive characteristics cut across regional boundaries. These features make the social structure a complex phenomenon. In relatively small societies, social structures remain less complex because the territorial boundary of the society coincides with the social and cultural ones, and the smallness of the community does not encourage too many sub-divisions.

 

Figure 3.2  Territorial and Ethnic Sub-systems of a Society

All these aspects of society are beautifully summed up in the definition of society given by Marion J. Levy Jr. in 1952, in a book titled The Structure of Society. A slight variation of that definition is used in his later publication on Modernization and the Structure of Societies (1966).

Levy defines society as a system of social action:

1. that involves a plurality of interacting individuals whose actions are in terms of the system concerned and who are recruited at least in part by their own sexual reproduction,
2. that constitutes a set of social structures such that action in terms of them is at least in theory capable of self-sufficiency for the maintenance of the plurality of individuals involved, and
3. that is capable of existing long enough to produce stable adult members of the system of action from infants of existing members.

Levi says, ‘One will not be misled seriously if he considers societies to refer roughly to the systems of action ordinarily called nations, countries, or societies, though for some technical questions and some of the “new” nations such identification could be misleading.’

Since this definition brilliantly encapsulates the discussion on society in this chapter, it can be regarded as a summary.