ADVERTISEMENTS:
In this article we will discuss about the society and its different groupings.
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft:
According to Tonnies, since the second half of the 19th Century, society has been gradually moving from gemeinscfurft to gesellschaft, i.e., from community to association. In other words, when industrialisation and urbanisation did not make much headway, life in society was largely communal in nature.
But gradually, with the spread of industry and increasing urbanisation, life became largely associational in nature. “Gemeinschaft (community) is old; Gesellschaft (society) is new as a name as well as a phenomenon …. Wherever urban culture blossoms and bears fruits, Gesellschaft appears as its indispensable organ. The rural people know little of it”.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Gemeinschaft:
Gemeinschaft or community is defined as “intimate, private, and exclusive living together” in a localized group most of whose members know one another and have a’ feeling of “belonging” to one another. It is also implied that there is a powerful body of public opinion to which the behaviour of all its members is subject.
One basic element of community is thus a sentiment of unity, a sense of pride among the people who constitute a community. Sociologists also add another dimension to the concept of community which, in their view, consists of a group of people who occupy a define territory within which the group is assured of a self-sufficing life.
That is, the territory must be such as to enable the people to pursue the total round of life, from their birth to their burial.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
A community has, thus, two attributes:
(i) Locality and
(ii) Community sentiment.
This view of community obviously embraces a very wide range of groups, starting from a neighborhood or village to a metropolitan city. Sometimes a small community may be a part of a larger community.
These small units of a larger community may still be called communities in so far as the people of these parts maintain distinctiveness of their own as compared to those of other parts and they spend all their lives within the bounds of the smaller community.
It should, however, be noted that with the passage of time the possibilities of self-sufficient life within the limits of small areas are increasingly being narrowed down. This is primarily for three reasons.
To begin with, the advance of technology and expansion of consumer goods industries are responsible for introducing sophistication into the needs and demands of the people making it difficult for small communities to satisfy them.
Secondly, improvement in transport and communication is responsible for making different areas inter-dependent. Thirdly, introduction of mechanical power and technology in the fields of manufacturing industries and agriculture, supplemented by improvements in transportation and communication, have led to modern urban society where many people live in cities, often with population numbered in millions.
Small, self-sufficient communities are relevant only for primitive people whose needs are simple and demand few. For these reasons, the trend today is towards bigger communities.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
As communities get larger and more complex, they tend to lose person-to-person contacts marked by intimacy and mutual dependence, and to become more impersonal. As a result, the individuals get considerable freedom from social control and the group-bonds get weaker.
Large communities, however, have some advantages in comparison with small communities. Large communities make possible a multiplicity of social organisations with the consequent advantages of specialisation.
These advantages are absent in small communities where everything is done through the community and the family. For instance, larger communities can afford to have different types of clinics and hospitals which, with their improved techniques, nurse and heal better than families do.
As civilized beings, writes Maclver, we need both large and small communities. “The great community brings us opportunity, stability, economy, the constant stimulus of a richer, more varied culture. But in the smaller community we find the nearer, more intimate satisfaction. The larger community provides peace and protection, patriotism and sometimes war, automobile and the radio. The smaller provides friends and friendship, gossip and face-to-face rivalry, local pride and abode. Both are essential to the full life process”
There are, however, various other factors which introduce differences among communities.
For instance, among a group of towns of the same size, some may be largely industrial with most of their populations employed in factories, some may be agricultural towns with most of their inhabitants dependent on trade with the surrounding farmers, one may be a university town, another a health resort. All these towns, for obvious reasons, reveal different characteristics of their own.
Besides, towns of the same size may be different according to the religion and culture of the regions in which towns are located. If there is a high degree of literacy and cultural development in the region, cultural life of the city will also be highly advanced. Likewise, the institutions of a town reflect the dominant religious activities of the people.
For instance, towns like Varanasi, Vrindaban or Tirupati, which have grown around temples, reveal characteristics that are different from those of commerce cities like Calcutta, Madras or Bombay. But the major differences among communities rest on whether they are rural or urban.
Gesellschaft:
Gesellschaft or association is defined as ‘public life’, as something which is consciously and deliberately entered upon Maclver defined an association “as a group expressly organised for the pursuit of an interest or group of interests in common”.
Examples are an athletic club, a dramatic society or an association for the pursuit of scientific investigations. These illustrations point to the fact that persons with similar interest form a group to pursue their common interest. Such a group is known as an association.
Associations may, therefore, be viewed as special interest groups. Modern industrial societies of the West or the ways of life in mammoth cities like Calcutta or Bombay or Delhi are associational in character in which the hold of tradition and neighbourhood has largely broken down.
An association may be distinguished from a community from the following points of view. First, while an association is developed with a particular or special interest in view, a community is the total organisation of social life within an area. When, however, an association has plurality of ends, it approaches the concept of community. Secondly, in a community individuals are involved as complete or whole persons.
For instance, when the residents of a village or a neighbourhood are engaged in some common action for improving the quality of community life, they are involved as whole persons who are known to one another, more or less, on a person-to-person basis. In an association, on the other hand, the members are not ‘wholly’ involved as individuals.
They are rather involved as ‘functionaries’ for the satisfaction of specific and partial ends. Thirdly, a community is united by an accord of feeling or sentiment among individuals, whereas an association is united by a rational agreement of interest.
Fourthly, association has no reference to geographical location, but “the residential tie to an area is one attribute that distinguishes a community from other social groups”. Thus, Indian Science Congress is an association. A community may comprise a number of associations.
Durkheim on Organic Solidarity and Mechanical Solidarity:
The relationship between the inclusive society on the one hand and the social groupings on the other has been analysed from another angle. Traditional and pre-industrial societies, argued Durkheim, were bound together by a common world-view, a common belief system and a common way of thinking. There was not much differentiation.
He characterised the links of unity among people in traditional societies as mechanical solidarity. Modern industrial societies, by contrast, are marked by specialisation, complementarily and interdependence. The ruling principle of industrial societies is ‘structural differentiation’.
The people in these societies are bound together by a set of relationships which are so interdependent that sub-groups assigned to specific functions cannot remove themselves without severe material dislocation to the community as a whole. The unity and cohesion among people can, thus, be explained only in terms of their interdependence. Durkheim characterised the cohesion among these people as organic solidarity.
“Durkheim explained the transformation from one to the other by a ‘law of gravitation of the social world’. This law related the progressive division of labour to an increase in social interaction (which he called ‘moral density’).But ‘moral density cannot grow unless material density grows at the same time’, so that ‘the number and rapidity of the means of communication and transportation’ were ‘a visible and measurable symbol’ of changes in moral density and could take their place in the general formula. Durkheim then argued that as the contacts between traditional societies increased, so conflicts over the allocation of scarce resources between them became more likely, and they had to be resolved by a division of labour which transformed them into modern societies.’Similar occupations located at different points are as competitive as they are alike’, he wrote, ‘provided the difficulty of communication does not restrict the circle of their action’. In this simple model of a competitive space-economy, therefore, social differentiation was literally an agreement to differ, produced by changes in the spatial structure of society. The consensus might well be facilitated by some kind of cultural reinforcement mechanism, indeed it generally was, but its explanation remained a basically morphological one”.
Redfield’s approach in terms of Little Community:
Redfield advocates the study of large all-inclusive society in terms of the study of little communities. He advances two arguments in favour of this approach.
First, the little community “is a kind of human whole with which students of man have a great deal of experience”.
Secondly, “it is easier to develop a chain of thought in relation specially to villages and bands than to try to do so also in relation to personalities and civilizations and literatures”.
Thirdly, “the small community has been the very predominant form of human living throughout the history of mankind … One estimate is that today three-quarters of the human race still live in villages”.
Redfield defines the little community in terms of four characteristics:
(i) Distinctiveness:
It is not difficult to identify ‘where the community begins and where it ends’,
(ii) Smallness:
Being small, the little community ‘is the unit of personal observation’,
(iii) Homogeneity:
‘Activities and states of mind are much alike of all persons in corresponding sex and age positions; and the career of one generation repeats that of the preceding’,
(iv) Self-sufficiency:
It ‘provides for all or most of the activities and needs of the people in it. The little community is a cradle-to-the-grave arrangement’.