Ch 2Social Institutions: Continuity and Change — Class 12 Sociology, concept-first.

A population is not merely a collection of isolated individuals. It is a society — a web of distinct yet interlinked classes and communities.

You already know that caste is an ancient institution, thousands of years old. You also know that caste is very much alive in India today.

Caste is an institution uniquely associated with the Indian subcontinent. While other societies have had social arrangements that produced similar effects — such as racial segregation or estate system…

The caste system we see today is not an unchanged relic of ancient India. Its present form was powerfully shaped by the colonial period — roughly the 150 years from around 1800 to 1947 — and then by t…

The story of caste in independent India is not one of simple decline or persistence, but of profound and often contradictory transformation.

The word 'tribe' is surprisingly modern, even though the communities it describes are among the oldest in India.

Sociologists classify India's tribal communities using two broad sets of characteristics: permanent traits (things a tribe is born with, so to speak) and acquired traits (things that change over time,…

The debate about whether tribes are fundamentally different from caste-based peasant society or merely one end of a continuum dominated the 1960s.

Tribal identity in contemporary India is not a survival of some ancient, unchanging essence. The forced incorporation of tribal communities into the mainstream — economically, socially, and politicall…

The family is the first social world we know. We are born into it, spend most of our early years within it, and often feel intensely about it — pride, affection, resentment, longing.

The family is not a single, fixed institution. Across societies, it takes remarkably different forms depending on how a society organises residence after marriage, how it passes on property, and who h…