Logo

The social division of labor – the division of social roles in society – appears to play a very important role in shaping liminal situations. In less differentiated societies, many liminal situations are more structured and more fully ritualized. Accordingly, different themes of liminality, protest and antistructure are more fully articulated and in fact, highly regulated. Max Gluckman’s classical analysis of rituals of rebellion (1963) portrays exactly this type of situation, in which protest, liminality and antistructure are very closely interrelated, fully structured and placed in the center of the society. Tribal societies came under stress due to several factors. The extension of commerce, military incursions on tribal land, and the resettling of Brahmins amidst tribal populations has an impact, as did ideological coercion or persuasion to attract key members of the tribe into “mainstream” Hindu society. This led to many tribal communities becoming integrated into Hindu Society as jatis (or castes) while others who resisted were pushed into the hilly or forested areas, or remote tracks that had not yet been settled. This book deals with an unstated premise of the twentieth century paradigm for cultural development. This premise is that civilizations are the legitimate teleology of cultural development and that settlement societies like the plantation societies formed from the eighteenth century onwards ought to be considered as resting on the peripheries of developmental process. On the face of it, there is nothing wrong in this premise: in our quest for authenticity and ennobling ideals of human development, we do of course look upon civilizations as the pinnacle. This book contains the fundamental and basic information of subject and the selection of contents makes it an appropriate textbook for the students.