IDEOLOGY and SOCIAL SCIENCE

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About the Book:

One of the pioneers of sociological studies in India, Professor Andre Beteille has, over the past four decades, contributed a series of topical and stimulating articles to various newspaper. Some of these articles were collected in the book Chronicles of Our Time, published a few years ago. Ideology and Social Science is a new and riveting collection of Professor Beteille's writings on Indian society, politics and culture.

The fifty articles in this book cover a very wide range of subject: from the practice of sociology to the prospects of political liberalism, from contemporary debates about caste and caste quotas to old and still persisting myths about what is said to constitute the essence of Indian culture. Beteille's ambit includes the relevant and important themes of secularism, diversity and unity in cultures, the culture of tolerance, discrimination at work, value systems in the changing Indian family, and caste practices in village communities.

Steering clear of passing intellectual trends as well s partisan politics, Beteille reaches his conclusions based on a careful examination of the evidence, not on a search for facts that fit a preconceived theory. Through his writings, he makes a cogent and passionate appeal to separate sociology theory from the frameworks of social activism.

For Students of sociology as well as the general reader, this is a book that will stimulate thought and generate interest in social and political issues that are at the core of India's modernity any tradition.

About the Author:

Andre Beteille is Professor Emeritus of Sociology in the University of Delhi. He has held visiting appointments at Cambridge, the London School of Economics, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and various other institutions in Europe and America. He was also a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Edinburgh. He was a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow from 1968 to 1970, and received the Jawaharlal Nehru National Award of the Government of Madhya Pradesh in 1994.

Apart from his newspaper articles, he has published extensively in scholarly periodicals in India and abroad. His book include Caste, Class and Power, Studies in Agrarian Social Structure, and Society and Politics in India. The book of readings entitled Social Inequality,edited by him and published by Penguin Books in 1969, has been used in the teaching of sociology worldwide. A previous collection of newspaper articles was published by Penguin Books India in 2000 under the title Chronicles of Our Time.

Professor Beteille is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.