Bihar Intermediate Sociology (BSEB) flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Varna vs Jati

Varna is the fourfold textual model (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra) plus Avarna; jati is the local endogamous group with a specific occupation and rank. Varna is ideology; jati is lived practice.

Sanskritisation

M.N. Srinivas's term for lower castes adopting higher-caste rituals, diet, and customs to improve their social standing. It changes cultural practice, not necessarily economic position, and can coexist with Westernisation.

Dominant caste

Srinivas's term for a caste that dominates a village through numerical strength, land ownership, and ritual status together. Economic power plus numbers, not ritual rank alone, produces dominance.

Purity and pollution

Louis Dumont's core principle of caste hierarchy. The pure–impure opposition ranks groups and is expressed through food, touch, and marriage rules, making hierarchy a matter of ideology rather than economics.

Jajmani system

A traditional village patron-client system in which service castes (barbers, potters, weavers) received grain and protection from landowning patrons in return for hereditary services. Market exchange has largely replaced it.

Joint family

A family in which parents, married sons, their wives, and children live together under one roof, sharing property, kitchen, and authority. It is patrilineal and patrilocal in most of North India.

Matrilineal kinship

A system in which descent, inheritance, and group membership pass through the mother's line. Examples include the Khasi of Meghalaya and the traditional Nayar taravad of Kerala, though residence and authority vary.

Village exogamy

A North Indian marriage rule requiring a bride to be taken from a different village and clan. It strengthens inter-village alliances and prevents marriage within the local patrilineal group.

Cross-cousin marriage

Marriage between a man and his mother's brother's daughter or father's sister's daughter. This is common in South Indian kinship and preserves property and alliances within the extended kin group.

Mahr

In Muslim personal law, mahr is the dower a husband promises to his wife at marriage; it is her property and a legal obligation. Nikah is treated as a contract, not a sacrament.

Dowry Prohibition Act 1961

A law that penalises giving and taking dowry in connection with marriage. Section 304B IPC (now in the BNS) covers dowry death within seven years of marriage, and Section 498A covers cruelty.

Article 17

The constitutional article abolishing untouchability and forbidding its practice in any form. Its enforcement is supported by the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 and the Protection of Civil Rights Act 1955.

Mandal Commission

A commission appointed in 1979 and reporting in 1980 that recommended 27% reservation for Other Backward Classes in central government jobs. It was implemented in 1990 and expanded reservation politics.

Green Revolution

The adoption of high-yielding seed varieties, chemical fertilisers, and irrigation from the late 1960s. Output rose sharply in Punjab, Haryana, and western UP, but regional and class inequalities widened.

Operation Flood

India's dairy development programme launched in 1970 under Verghese Kurien, built on the Anand cooperative model. It linked milk producers to urban markets through a national milk grid.

MGNREGA

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 guarantees 100 days of unskilled wage employment per rural household per year. It is a legal right with demand-driven funding.

Disguised unemployment

A situation in which more workers are engaged in a task than are needed, so that removing some would not reduce output. It is typical of surplus labour in Indian family agriculture.

Social fact

Durkheim's term for ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that are external to the individual and exercise constraint over them. Examples include legal rules, language, and collective beliefs.

Anomie

Durkheim's term for a condition of normlessness in which social regulation breaks down. It explains anomic suicide, which rises when aspirations outrun the norms that restrain them.

Verstehen

Max Weber's method of interpretive understanding, in which the researcher grasps the subjective meanings actors attach to their actions. It distinguishes sociology from purely causal natural science.

Ideal type

Weber's analytical construct formed by accentuating the essential features of a phenomenon. It is not a description of reality but a measuring rod for comparing concrete cases.

Historical materialism

Marx's view that the economic base, comprising the forces and relations of production, shapes the superstructure of law, politics, and ideas. Change arises from contradictions between these elements.

Manifest and latent functions

Merton's distinction between the intended, recognised consequences of a social practice (manifest) and its unintended, unrecognised consequences (latent). The distinction reveals hidden social functions.

Looking-glass self

Cooley's idea that the self develops through imagining how we appear to others, imagining their judgement, and forming self-feeling such as pride or mortification. It is a social mirror.

Generalised other

Mead's term for the internalised attitudes of the wider community, which the child adopts in the game stage. It enables the individual to take the perspective of society as a whole.

Formal and informal control

Formal control uses written laws, courts, police, and codes with organised sanctions. Informal control uses custom, folkways, mores, gossip, ridicule, and public opinion, and is usually more pervasive.

Cultural relativism

The methodological principle that a culture should be understood in its own terms rather than judged by the standards of another. It is a research stance, distinct from moral endorsement of every practice.

Probability sampling

A sampling strategy in which every unit has a known, non-zero chance of selection, as in simple random, systematic, stratified, and cluster sampling. It permits statistical generalisation from sample to population.

Participant observation

A qualitative method in which the researcher joins a group's daily life over an extended period to record practices and meanings. It yields thick description but risks observer bias and reactivity.

Operationalisation

The process of translating an abstract concept into concrete, measurable indicators. For example, 'social class' may be operationalised as income, education, and occupation, which must be valid and reliable.

Ascribed and achieved status

Ascribed status is assigned at birth, such as caste, sex, or kinship position. Achieved status is earned through effort, such as occupation or education. Caste societies rest on ascription; class societies on achievement.

Social mobility

Movement of individuals or groups between social positions. Vertical mobility changes rank up or down; horizontal mobility changes group at the same rank. Inter-generational mobility compares parents and children.