Abstract
Today, there are plenty of discussions are going on about Indian culture and society from local to global level. Indian social structure, its nature etc, are the issues at the stake. This discussion is not the offshoot of modernity or globalization, rather, it can be traced back to the past twenty centuries when westerners started to visit India as travelers, merchants, and missionaries. Their descriptions of India inevitably generated an interesting discussion about; how the Indian social system is structured; what are elements constitute that social structure? In this discussion, most of them identified that practices, rituals are one of the elements which constitute the social structure. Though they recognize rituals as fundamental elements, they are not confident enough to show theoretically how rituals create the social structure, because some scholars have a pessimistic view about rituals. Therefore one has to find what kind of relationship rituals have with social structure? In this way, the present study tries to formulate a problem about their relationships and also tries to theorize rituals in a new fashion.
Presenters
Santhosh KumarFaculty, Public Administration, Karnataka State Rural Development and Panchayat Raj University, Karnataka, India
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Rituals, Caste System, Hierarchy, Social Status
