Society Culture Development

Society, Culture, Development

This book presents an original approach towards understanding and appraising social reality by drawing a sequential relation between the concepts of society, culture and development. The author′s central objective is to harness social science thinking in order to study developmental processes in the context of the emerging relationship between nation-states and the world system. Mukherjee achieves a remarkable synthesis among the diverse strands of thought and research in the social sciences that have developed over the last two centuries. Mukherjee achieves a methodological breakthrough by treating economy, polity and culture as symbiotic variables instead of any one of them as an independent, dependent or intervening variable. The volume as a whole makes a distinctive contribution to social theory and social science methodology.

Culture, Development and Social Theory

This important book places culture back at the centre of debates in development studies. It introduces new ways of conceptualizing culture in relation to development by linking development studies to cultural studies, studies of social movements, religion and the notion of 'social suffering'. The author expertly argues that in the current world crises it is necessary to recover a more holistic vision of development that creates a vocabulary linking more technical (and predominantly economic) aspects of development with more humanistic and ecological goals. Any conception of post-capitalist society, he argues, requires cultural, as well as economic and political, dimensions.

Cultural Development