NTA UGC NET/JRF Exam., June 2021 Sociology (Paper-II)

From the seeming irrelevancies of this archaeological gossip, some concrete meaning for the ambiguous term "knowledge" should yet have been emerging. It has at least been distinguished from instinctive "responses" and from what popular psychology terms "memories", as long as such remain personal and private. The knowledge embodied in the hand axes of the Old Stone Age was both useful and public. It enabled our remote precursors or ancestors to make serviceable tools such as they needed to supplement the deficiencies of their limbs and other bodily organs. And it was communicated to and transmitted by all human beings who made hand axes for thousands of generations. Thus this knowledge was preserved-but not only preserved. It was also enriched and extended. During the two or three hundred years over which hand axes were being made, archaeologists can detect improvements in their form and changes in the techniques of manufacture. More efficient tools were produced with less effort. These progressive changes reflect additions to knowledge, discoveries and inventions that were made public and incorporated in the traditional lore or knowledge used, transmitted and maintained by Old Stone Age societies. Of course, the progressive change observed in archaeologists' "hand axes" is just one case of the general technological progress from simple manual tools of stone and bone to complicated machines made of metallic alloys and other artificial substances and operated by electrical or even nuclear power. It is this technological progress that has secured for Homo sapiens the victory over all competitors in the evolutionary race for survival. But technological progress in its turn is just the result and consequence of the accumulation of knowledge. That accumulation was possible just because human knowledge is public; one member of the species can communicate to another what he has found out.

Archaeologists can detect in the form of hand axes and change in ------

Bureaucracy in India offers a most structural foundation for modernization of the society and growth of a consensual normative order. It, no doubt suffers from internal culture tensions; these tensions arise from role conflict in interstructural participation of the bureaucrats; his familistic, caste and kin-oriented particularism might come into clash with the ideology of universalism in his bureaucratic roles; his personal loyalties might cut across the legal anonymity and abstractness of his 'office'.

But these dangers have been over-rated and overemphasized, on the false belief that these exclusively arise out of the less 'developed' and traditional nature of the Indian society; when we look deeper into it, many dysfunctions seem to be related with the phenomena of power and the relative deprivations of groups and classes. In this form such dysfunctions of bureaucracy may be comparable to those existing in the Western societies. It also emerges from the false assumption that functionally equivalent processes or results must everywhere follow structurally similar growth. This happens to be a popular fallacy in most of the thinking that goes on about modernization of the traditional societies.