Glossary

This chapter's glossary collects a handful of terms that recur across its discussion of social order and social change in rural and urban settings, and reviewing them together is a useful way to consolidate what the chapter covers. Customs duties and tariffs are taxes on goods crossing a border, used to make imported goods less competitive against domestic production -- a reminder that even routine trade policy can act as a source of economic and social change. Dominant castes, a term coined by M.N. Srinivas, refers to numerically large, landowning intermediate castes whose control over land and votes gives them outsized political influence in a region -- central to understanding how rural power structures form and persist.

On the urban side, gated communities are affluent, self-segregated neighbourhoods sealed off from their surroundings with controlled entry and their own private civic services, while gentrification describes the reverse-status process by which a lower-income neighbourhood is converted into a middle- or upper-class one as property values rise. Ghetto and ghettoisation, terms with roots in the segregated Jewish quarters of medieval European cities, now describe any neighbourhood dominated by a single religious, ethnic, caste, or other identity group, and the social process by which a once-mixed neighbourhood becomes such a concentrated enclave -- both are ways urban space can harden existing social divisions rather than dissolve them. …