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Cultivating Democracy is the first study of its kind of the world’s largest democracy that shows how the values of republicanism are essential for successful democratic practice. In 1950, after independence, India constituted itself as a sovereign democratic republic. While democracy indicated the character of the vertical representative nature of the relationship between citizens and state, the term republic outlined the horizontal relationship of fraternity between people and an active engagement by citizens. The discussion of Indian politics in this book thereby attends to both its institutional form and its democratic culture and shows how the project of democracy is incomplete unless it is also accompanied by a continual cultivation of active citizenship of republicanism. This book is an anthropological study of the relationship of formal political democracy and the cultivation of active citizenship in one particular rural setting in India, studied from 1998 to 2013. It draws on deep ethnographic engagement with the people and social life in two villages, both during elections and in the time in between them, to show how these two temporalities connect. The analysis shows how an agrarian village society produces the social imaginaries required for democratic and republican values. The ethnographic microscope on a single paddy growing setting allows us to examine how the various social institutions of kinship, economy, and religion are critical sites for the continual civic cultivation of cooperation, vigilance, redistribution, inviolate commitment, and hope—values that are essential for democracy.

Problem-solving sociology attempts to use the traditions of sociological research to solve real-world problems, and uses the attempt to grapple with real-world problems as a way to reformulate understandings of society and renew or reinvent those traditions. This book provides advice for how to turn an interest in solving major social problems into research projects that begin to do so. The book provides suggested methods and tools, models of successful problem-solving research conducted by established scholars as well as by undergraduate and graduate students, defenses against some common objections, and an exploration of where this kind of work fits in contemporary sociology.

Social structures can be fruitfully studied as networks of social relationships. These should not be conceptualized, and examined, as stable, acultural patterns of ties. Building on relational sociology around Harrison White, the book examines the interplay of social networks and meaning. Social relationships consist of dynamic bundles of expectations about the behavior between particular actors. These expectations come out of the process of communication, and they make for the regularity and predictability of communication, reducing its inherent uncertainty. Like all social structures, relationships and networks are made of expectations that guide social processes, but that continuously change as the result of these processes. Building on Niklas Luhmann, the events in networks can fruitfully be conceptualized as communication, the processing of meaning between actors (rather than emanating from them). Communication draws on a variety of cultural forms to define and negotiate the relationships between actors: relationship frames like “love” and “friendship” prescribe the kinds of interaction appropriate for types of tie; social categories like ethnicity and gender guide the interaction within and between categories of actors; and collective and corporate actors form on the basis of cultural models like “company,” “bureaucracy,” “street gang,” or “social movement.” Such cultural models are diffused in systems of education and in the mass media, but they also institutionalize in communication, with existing patterns of interaction and relationships serving as models for others. Social groups are semi-institutionalized social patterns, with a strong social boundary separating their members from the social environment.