Social Institutions: Family, Marriage, Kinship, Religion, Education, Economy and Polity
What this domain tests
Institutions are organised, normative ways of meeting basic social needs. The exam expects you to name types, functions and Indian legal and social realities for each institution, not just describe them.
Core content
- Family: nuclear vs joint; patrilineal/matrilineal descent; patrilocal/matrilocal/neolocal residence. Murdock's four universal functions - sexual, reproductive, economic, educational. Indian debates: nuclearisation with migration, rising female-headed households, elderly care.
- Marriage: monogamy, polygyny, polyandry (historically among some Nair and Todas groups); endogamy (caste, gotra) vs exogamy (clan, village); cross-cousin marriage in South India; dowry vs bride price. Laws: Hindu Marriage Act 1955 (monogamy, age, prohibited degrees), Special Marriage Act 1954, Dowry Prohibition Act 1961, Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006.
- Kinship: consanguineal (blood) vs affinal (marriage); lineage, clan, descent; usages - avoidance, joking relationship, teknonymy, amitate, avunculate.
- Religion: Durkheim's sacred/profane and totemism; integrative and tension-managing functions (Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown); Weber's Protestant ethic link to capitalism.
- Education: manifest (skills, selection, certification) vs latent (socialisation, integration, mate selection); conflict view - hidden curriculum and reproduction of inequality (Bowles and Gintis).
- Economy and polity: economy as provisioning institutions; Polanyi's embeddedness; Weber's three types of legitimate authority - traditional, charismatic, legal-rational; the modern state and bureaucracy.
Worked example
A family runs a shop, trains children in ritual purity, and marries a daughter outside her clan. Read this as: economic institution (shop as household enterprise), religious socialisation (ritual training), and exogamy as a kinship rule (clan exogamy), with the marriage also being an alliance between kin groups.
Traps
Swapping endogamy and exogamy; confusing polygyny with polyandry; treating dowry as bride price; describing kinship only as blood relation; listing family types without functions.