SOCIAL FORGETTING

- She travelled in America wrote a travelogue, and developed “ How to Observe Morals and Manners (l838b)” the first practical guide to sociological observation and research before Durkheim, Weber, Marx .

◦ In America she used these methods to compare the moral principles American’s professed (democratic) vs. the social reality of how they lived. She found a wide gap - kept alive through a social “pressure towards conformity”.

◦ She published ~60 years before Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method (1895). In the 20th century both men & women scholars have been on both sides: remembering & forgetting.

◦ Sociologically studied “social class, forms of religion, types of suicide, national character, domestic relations and the status of women, delinquency and criminology” (Durkheim’s social facts )

- “Through self-study she rigorously augmented her early exposure to subjects routinely taught only to males. University study was barred to women, but Martineau maintained a regimen of intense, self directed investigation throughout her life. ”

- “She successfully supported herself as an author in various forms ... In the Illustrations of Political Economy she used fiction to explicate the principles of the new science of” liberal economics.

- Translated Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive and popularised it in the United States.

Was a champion of equality for all women : “She campaigned against victimisation of widows. She went on to organise a successful barbers’ strike against the prevailing practice of shaving of widows’ heads.

She advocated and encouraged widow remarriage. Adopted the son of a brahmin widow” and faced social ire

“She canvassed against infanticide of ‘illegitimate’ children. She opened a home to rehabilitate such children. Her own home became a sanctuary for deserted women and orphaned children.”

- She gave speeches transmitting the thought of equality and was one of the first Indian women to “publish two collections of her own important speeches”

- Promoted emancipatory women‘s education. ““Learn English to annihilate caste” was a common refrain in some of her poems.” Why?

- Christian converts and missionaries were the first trained women teachers in India. Contemporary to them were Savitribai and Fatima Sheikh who set up multiple schools.

- Led the Satyashodhak Samaj after Phule’s death.

- Together with Phule developed the Sarvajanik Satya Dharma (the Religion of Universal Truth) which had no priests, encouraged individual thought and was for everybody who was willing to change

- Felt that sociological understanding could reform selfish individualism of capitalism because social studies were inherently moral in character. We must have faith in society.

- Division of labour in pre-modern societies was strongly constrained. There was a mechanical repetitious quality to ritual practices generating a mechanical solidarity . Law worked through physical retribution to keep boundaries drawn (repressive law) .

- DoL in modern societies is dynamic. Fellow feeling here has to develop as organic solidarity , ie, in a dynamic environment without any basis in kinship. Legal sanctions here reform wrongdoers into good community-members (restitutive law) .

Suicide: A Study in Sociology , 1897 was a pioneering analysis, matching suicide statistics to logic of social (im)balance:

- Egoistic Suicide - depressed from lack of community x Altruistic Suicide - death as obligation to a community

- Anomic Suicide - everything staked on desire x Fatalistic Suicide - future is blocked to all desires

Elderly Japanese

Hindu wives

Indian Farmers

Institutional Murder

- While the Protestant ethic set-up capitalist habits, capitalist modernity with its drive to ‘rationalization’ (calculation and standardization) ‘disenchants’ all our interactions and institutions, leaving us approaching an ‘ iron cage ’ of ‘bureaucratic rationality’.

- Through large scale statistical studies we can find solutions to the social problems of the age and solve them with economics. America was the model society.

- We must not neglect increase of domination through ‘social closure’, trying to stabilize rewards within groups of ‘insiders’ (men, white workers, upper-castes) - which is not direct economic exploitation.

“In general, we understand by ‘power’ the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the same action.”

Karl Marx (Conflict

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.