Q.Discuss the different aspects of the term 'society'. How is it different from your common sense understanding?

"Society" is not one single obvious thing — it can refer to several different scales of belonging and also contains real internal inequalities, which common sense usually glosses over.

The word "society" is used constantly in everyday speech as though it names one single, self-evident thing — "our society," "Indian society." Looked at more carefully, though, the chapter shows the term has several different aspects, and pinning down exactly which "society" is meant is itself a genuine analytical task, not something to be taken for granted.

The first aspect is that of scale and type of membership: a single individual can, quite legitimately, name several different "societies" they belong to — their neighbourhood, their community, their caste (or tribe), their professional circle, or the nation as a whole. None of these is automatically the "right" one; each is relevant in a different way and for a different kind of question. This is the difficulty the filmmaker Satyajit Ray is quoted wrestling with when deciding what to put into his films — the village, the city, the historical epics — because deciding what to represent as "society" is genuinely hard, and every choice inevitably leaves something else out.

The second aspect is that "society," even at a single scale like the nation, is not one smooth, uniform whole — it contains real pluralities and inequalities. The same national society contains hungry people and obese people, agricultural labourers and hospital surgeons, working-class neighbourhoods and slum settlements. So even a single "society" is internally plural rather than homogeneous.

This is precisely where the sociological sense of the term departs from ordinary common-sense understanding. In everyday talk, "society" is usually an unexamined backdrop — something simply lived in, and often used to explain individual outcomes in terms of personal character (as in naturalistic explanations of poverty). Sociology instead treats "society" as something that must be actively defined and investigated for each study, forces a choice about which scale of membership is relevant, and stays alert to internal pluralities and inequalities that common sense tends to smooth over. The term, in sociological use, becomes the object of systematic, empirical enquiry rather than a comfortable assumption.