Content about History

Not much attention has been paid by sociologists and anthropologists to the study of caste relationships in an urban setting. Most of the field studies about caste relationships have been confined to rural areas, the village being the unit of careful observation and study. No doubt, there are some urban studies of the problem, e.g., by Kuppuswamy, and by P. N. Prabhu.  But such studies have more often been concerned with eliciting attitudes and opinions than with directly observing and theoret­ically interpreting the processes of caste mobility.

Sardar Patel was one of Mohandas Gandhi’s closest associates, and he organized and led several satyagrahas during India’s struggle for freedom from British rule. When India achieved independence in 1947, Patel became Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, and he presided over the most difficult task facing the nascent nation-state, namely the integration of over 500 princely states into the Indian Union.

Giambattista Vico is often credited with the invention of thephilosophy of history.

Claude Levi-Strauss has long been interested in the role of reciprocity, in the form of social exchange, in creating and main­taining bonds of affiliation in human societies (see, of course, Levi-Strauss 1969). In “The Bear and the Barber” he compares and contrasts two structural types usually assumed to be pro­foundly different from each other. The structural type denoted by the word “bear” in the title of the paper is labelled “totemic”: he considers it characteristic of classic Australian aboriginal groups, among others.

“....the songs that I have sung

Echo in the distance
Like the sound
Of a windmill goin' 'round
I guess I'll always be
A soldier of fortune”  - rockers Deep Purple in their 1974 hit song written by D.Coverdale and R.Blackmore use the phrase `soldier of fortune' here more in the sense of an adventurer than to refer to a mercenary.

Records left by early British observers describe several variants of a system of ‘slavery’that existed in the Malnad in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The followingis a composite view of these sources.