SOC5007 Sociology — Unit 1: Introduction

Unit 1: Introduction

Syllabus coverage in this unit
1.1 Meaning, Definition and Importance · 1.2 Nature and Scope · 1.3 Relationship between Sociology and other Social Sciences (Anthropology, History, Political Science, Economics, Psychology, and Law) · 1.4 Origin and development of Sociology in the World and in Nepal · 1.5 Subdivisions of Sociology · 1.6 Uses of Sociology

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1.1 Meaning, Definition and Importance

Etymology: socius (Latin: companion, associate) + logos (Greek: study) = the study of companionship — of human association. The word was coined by Auguste Comte in 1838 (he first called the field “social physics”).

Classic definitions (quote briefly, attribute fully):

• Comte: sociology is the science of social phenomena, subject to natural-law-like regularities — the “queen of the sciences” in his positive hierarchy.
• Emile Durkheim: sociology is the science of social institutions — their genesis and their functioning.
• Max Weber: sociology is the science that attempts the interpretive understanding (“Verstehen”) of social action — understanding behaviour from the actor’s point of view.

Working synthesis (your exam definition): Sociology is the scientific study of society — of social relationships, groups, institutions, structures and processes — using systematic empirical methods, with the aim of explaining both the regularities and the transformations of collective human life.

Why it matters to a law student (make this your opening paragraph in essays):

1. Law regulates society; society produces law. Every statute — the Domestic Violence Act 2066, the Muluki Civil Code 2074, the Labour Act 2074 — is a hypothesis about how people behave and how behaviour should change. A lawyer who cannot read society cannot read what the legislature was trying to do.
2. Facts in litigation are social facts. Discrimination, customary practice, community standards, “reasonableness” — courts weigh social realities constantly (public-interest litigation is built on them).
3. Law reform demands social diagnosis. The Muluki Ain of 1854 codified Nepal’s caste order; the Codes of 2074 dismantled it. That is sociological change written into legal history — the two disciplines meet in Unit 3 (Sociology of Law).

1.2 Nature and Scope

Nature — sociology is:

1. A science — empirical (evidence from observation, survey, census, fieldwork), methodical, aiming at explanation and generalisation; but an interpretive science too, since human behaviour carries meaning (the Weber point).
2. Categorical, not (primarily) normative — it asks what is (how society works) more than what ought to be; still, no discipline is value-free in practice — a running debate you should name.
3. Both pure and applied — theory-building and problem-solving (development planning, policy design, law reform).
4. Generalising, not just particularising — from one village’s water dispute to the general patterns of conflict and cooperation.

Scope: everything from the dyad (two friends) to globalisation; from family, kinship and village life to state, market, religion, media and law. In the Nepali classroom the scope question has a special edge: with over 120 languages and 125 caste/ethnic groups (2011 census) in a country of about 29 million (2021 census), Nepal offers sociology micro-diversity and macro-change at once.

1.3 Relationship between Sociology and Other Social Sciences

The syllabus names six — treat each as “kinship with a difference.”

Discipline	Its core question	Overlap with sociology	The difference (exam point)
Anthropology	What makes humans human? Culture, kinship, ritual, origin	Methods of fieldwork; concepts of culture, kinship, religion; in Nepal the two are historically twin disciplines (see 1.4)	Anthropology classically studied small, “other” societies holistically (and their pre-modern life); sociology studied one’s own industrial society. The line has now almost dissolved
History	What happened, in sequence?	Both reconstruct society across time; sociology of the past ≈ social history	History is idiographic (particular events, chronology); sociology is nomothetic (patterns, laws-like regularities). History supplies sociology its longitudinal data (see your Nepali History course)
Political Science	How is power organised and exercised?	Political sociology: state, parties, power, legitimacy, movements	Political science focuses on formal polity (government, elections, constitutions); sociology asks how power lives in all social relations — family, caste, gender, economy
Economics	How are scarce goods produced and distributed?	Economic sociology: work, markets, consumption, embeddedness of economy in society	Economics models choice with abstractions (rational actor); sociology insists behaviour is shaped by norms, networks, status — not price signals alone
Psychology	How does the individual mind work?	Social psychology; socialisation; attitudes and behaviour	Psychology’s unit is the individual; sociology’s is the group and the interaction. Both meet in the nature–nurture debate (Unit 4.5)
Law	How is conduct normatively ordered and enforced?	The whole field of Sociology of Law (Unit 3): law as social institution, social control, and social product	Doctrinal legal science asks what the rule is; sociology asks what the rule does to society, and what society does to the rule. The bridge disciplines: sociological jurisprudence, legal realism, law-and-society

Memory hook: Sociology is the general practitioner among the social sciences — the others are specialists in one organ of the social body; law is the specialist sociology made a profession.

1.4 Origin and Development of Sociology

A. In the world — born of three revolutions

1. The French Revolution (1789) — political order could be made, not inherited: society itself became an object of design and study.
2. The Industrial Revolution — urbanisation, factories, a new class order, unprecedented social problems (slums, labour, alienation): old explanations failed.
3. The scientific/intellectual revolution — the method of natural science (Newton) tempted thinkers to a “social physics.”

The founding lineage (know each in one line):

• Auguste Comte (1798–1857) — coined the name; positivism; the law of three stages (theological → metaphysical → positive/scientific).
• Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) — social evolutionism; “survival of the fittest” applied (wrongly, later shown) to societies.
• Karl Marx (1818–1883) — class conflict as the motor of history; the material base of social order (full treatment in Unit 3).
• Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) — the first professor of the discipline (Bordeaux); Rules of Sociological Method (1895): social facts as things, external to and coercive of the individual; founded the first school (L’Année Sociologique).
• Max Weber (1864–1920) — interpretive sociology; rationalisation, bureaucracy, authority, religion and economy (Units 3, 6).

Later currents (name-drop accurately): the Chicago School (urban sociology, 1920s); Talcott Parsons‘ structural functionalism (order through shared values); Robert Merton (manifest/latent functions — see Unit 6); conflict theory‘s revival; symbolic interactionism (Blumer, building on Mead); phenomenological and critical traditions; feminist and postcolonial sociology; today’s computational and digital sociology.

B. In Nepal

1. Pre-history: before the discipline existed, its raw material was compiled — vamshavali chronicles, Hodgson’s and later ethnographies, the census (first modern count 1911), and the legal codification of the social order itself (the Muluki Ain 1854 — a state sociology of caste).
2. The opening (1951) ended Rana closure; foreign researchers and development aid poured in — anthropology arrived before sociology, through village and ethnic studies. Dor Bahadur Bista’s People of Nepal (1967)* became the classic portrait of the country’s communities; his later Fatalism and Development (1991) argued that fatalism and the “afno manchhe”* (one’s-own-people) patronage system blocked Nepali modernisation — a thesis still fought over today.
3. Institutionalisation: the Central Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tribhuvan University (1981) — a deliberately combined department, reflecting Nepal’s conditions (a small, multi-ethnic society needing both lenses). From a single MA programme, sociology spread to hundreds of campuses and is now among the most popular subjects at the school and bachelor levels.
4. Nepali sociology’s signature themes: caste/ethnicity and exclusion; development, aid and dependency; migration and remittance (the remade village); social movements (1951, 1990, 2006, Madhesh); religion and identity; federalism (Unit 7 draws on all of them). Professional infrastructure: the Sociological and Anthropological Society of Nepal (SASON) and its journal — the syllabus’s reference list sits squarely in this tradition.
5. Why it matters here (closing line for exams): in a society changing as fast as Nepal’s, sociology is not an academic luxury — it is the diagnostic instrument for the very problems (inclusion, migration, violence, federalism) that Nepali law is now asked to solve.

1.5 Subdivisions of Sociology

Not a fixed official list — organise it in three families:

Family	Branches
Foundational	Sociological theory; methods/research methodology; history of social thought
Institutional fields	Sociology of the family, kinship and marriage; religion; education; economy/work; politics; law; science; medicine/health; media
Process-and-problem fields	Rural and urban sociology; sociology of development; demography/population; criminology and penology; sociology of gender; stratification studies; environmental sociology; digital sociology; social psychology; social change

Law student’s route through the map: sociological theory (Unit 3’s Durkheim–Marx–Weber–Pound) → sociology of law → criminology → sociology of development (Unit 5) → contemporary issues (Unit 7).

1.6 Uses of Sociology

1. Self-knowledge of one’s own society — Nepal’s diversity makes the “sociological imagination” (C. Wright Mills’ term: connecting personal biography to history) a daily necessity, not a metaphor.
2. Policy and planning — censuses, labour-force surveys, demographic and health surveys are applied sociology; plans (Unit 5.6) are built on them.
3. Law reform and the administration of justice — evidence-based legislation, PIL fact-finding, sentencing and corrections policy, understanding of crime (criminology) and of dispute behaviour (why cases settle, or never arrive: the “unmet legal need”).
4. Development practice — participatory appraisal, social inclusion audits, gender analysis.
5. Governance and management — organisations, bureaucracy (Weber again), service delivery.
6. Civic and professional formation — for the lawyer specifically: cultural relativism (fairness to clients unlike oneself), structural thinking (not blaming only individuals), and the humility that “law in books” ≠ “law in action” (Pound — Unit 3).

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Model Questions

Short-answer questions

1. Define sociology, attributing the term to its coiner.
2. Write short notes: social facts; Verstehen; positivism; the “afno manchhe” system; sociological imagination.
3. How did the Industrial Revolution give birth to sociology?
4. When and how was sociology institutionalised in Nepal?

Long-answer questions

1. “Sociology is the scientific study of social relationships, institutions and structures.” Discuss with reference to its nature and scope.
2. Compare sociology with anthropology, history, political science, economics, psychology and law, showing overlaps and the specific difference in each case.
3. Trace the development of sociology from Comte to Weber, and describe its growth in Nepal since 1951.
4. “For a Nepali law student, sociology is not an elective but equipment.” Discuss the uses of sociology with illustrations from Nepali law.

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