Articles by Andre Beteille

Necessities and Luxuries Andre Beteille The Culture of Flowers by Jack Goody; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1993; pp xvii + 462, price not stated.

Religion as a Subject for Sociology Andre Beteille The sociological study of religion brings sharply into focus certain interesting questions of approach and method and a discussion of these is of wider interest in the study of society as a whole, including the study of such subjects as class, gender, nation, and, more generally, politics. There is, in particular, the issue of the comparative advantages of approaches that favour detachment, objectivity and value-neutrality as against those that favour commitment, engagement and partisanship.

A hundred years and more after Spencer, Tylor and Durkheim, it cannot be said that sociologists and social anthropologists have a method that they would all agree to describe as the comparative method. There is as much disagreement among them about it now as there was in the past, even though they have trimmed their ambitions considerably about what they can expect from such a method in the study of society and culture.

Rise of Indian Sociology Andre Beteille The Dominant Caste and Other Essays by M N Srinivas; Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1987; pp ix + 195, Rs 125.

Andre Beteille Despite the absence of clearly defined procedures for making intensive field studies, a great deal of of the systematic information that we have about social reality in contemporary India is based on this kind of study. Some of our best insights into kinship, religion and local-level politics come from intensive studies made by social anthropologists using the method of participant-observation. Although this approach has so far been used mainly in the study of village communities, it can he applied to the investigation of practically any sector of contemporary society.