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151.
Human Biology does nothing to structure human society. Age may enfeeble us all, but cultures vary considerably in the prestige and power they accord to the elderly. Giving birth is a necessary condition for being a mother, but it is not sufficient. We expect mothers to behave in maternal ways and to display appropriately maternal sentiments. We prescribe a clutch of norms or rules that govern the role of a mother. That the social role is independent of the biological base can be demonstrated by going back three sentences. Giving birth is certainly not sufficient to be a mother but, as adoption and fostering show, it is not even necessary!
The fine detail of what is expected of a mother or a father or a dutiful son differs from culture to culture, but everywhere behaviour is coordinated by the reciprocal nature of roles. Husbands and wives, parents and children, employers and employees, waiters and customers, teachers and pupils, warlords and followers; each makes sense only in its relation to the other. The term ‘role’ is an appropriate one, because the metaphor of an actor in a play neatly expresses the rule-governed nature or scripted nature of much of social life and the sense that society is a joint production. Social life occurs only because people play their parts (and that is as true for war and conflicts as for peace and love) and those parts make sense only in the context of the overall show. The drama metaphor also reminds us of the artistic licence available to the players. We can play a part straight or, as the following from J.P. Sartre conveys, we can ham it up.
Let us consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tightrope-walker....All his behaviour seems to us a game....But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe.
The American sociologist Erving Goffman built an influential body of social analysis on elaborations of the metaphor of social life as drama. Perhaps his most telling point was that it is only through acting out a part that we express character. It is not enough to be evil or virtuous; we have to be seen to be evil or virtuous.
There is distinction between the roles we play and some underlying self. Here we might note that some roles are more absorbing than others. We would not be surprised by the waitress who plays the part in such a way as to signal to us that she is much more than her occupation. We would be surprised and offended by the father who played his part ‘tongue in cheek’. Some roles are broader and more far-reaching than others. Describing someone as a clergyman or faith healer would say far more about that person than describing someone as a bus driver.[1] What is the thematic highlight of this passage?
(1) In the absence of strong biological linkages, reciprocal roles provide the mechanism for coordinating human behaviour.
(2) In the absence of reciprocal roles, biological linkages provide the mechanism for coordinating human behaviour.
(3) Human behaviour is independent of biological linkages and reciprocal roles.
(4) Human behaviour depends on biological linkages and reciprocal roles.
(5) Reciprocal roles determine normative human behavior in society.
[2] Which of the following would have been true if biological linkages structured human society?
(1) The role of mother would have been defined through her reciprocal relationship with her children.
(2) We would not have been offended by the father playing his role ‘tongue in cheek’.
(3) Women would have adopted and fostered children rather than giving birth to them.
(4) Even if warlords were physically weaker than their followers, they would still dominate them.
(5) Waiters would have stronger motivation to serve their customers.[3] It has been claimed in the passage that “some roles are more absorbing than others”. According to passage, which of the following seem(s) appropriate reason(s) for such a claim?
A. Some roles carry great expectations from the society preventing manifestation of the true self.
B. Society ascribes so much importance to some roles that the conception of self may get aligned with the roles being performed.
C. Some roles require development of skill and expertise leaving little time for manifestation of self.
(1) A only
(2) B only
(3) C only
(4) A & B
(5) B & Casked in CAT
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152.
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155.
The difficulties historians face in establishing cause-and-effect relations in the history of human societies are broadly similar to the difficulties facing astronomers, climatologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, geologists, and palaeontologists. To varying degrees each of these fields is plagued by the impossibility of performing replicated, controlled experimental interventions, the complexity arising from enormous numbers of variables, the resulting uniqueness of each system, the consequent impossibility of formulating universal laws, and the difficulties of predicting emergent properties and future behaviour. Prediction in history, as in other historical sciences, is most feasible on large spatial scales and over long times, when the unique features of millions of small-scale brief events become averaged out. Just as I could predict the sex ratio of the next 1,000 newborns but not the sexes of my own two children, the historian can recognize factors that made inevitable the broad outcome of the collision between American and Eurasian societies after 13,000 years of separate developments, but not the outcome of the 1960 U.S. presidential election. The details of which candidate said what during a single televised debate in October 1960 Could have given the electoral victory to Nixon instead of to Kennedy, but no details of who said what could have blocked the European conquest of Native Americans.
How can students of human history profit from the experience of scientists in other historical sciences? A methodology that has proved useful involves the comparative method and so-called natural experiments. While neither astronomers studying galaxy formation nor human historians can manipulate their systems in controlled laboratory experiments, they both can take advantage of natural experiments, by comparing systems differing in the presence or absence (or in the strong or weak effect) of some putative causative factor. For example, epidemiologists, forbidden to feed large amounts of salt to people experimentally, have still been able to identify effects of high salt intake by comparing groups of humans who already differ greatly in their salt intake; and cultural anthropologists, unable to provide human groups experimentally with varying resource abundances for many centuries, still study long-term effects of resource abundance on human societies by comparing recent Polynesian populations living on islands differing naturally in resource abundance.
The student of human history can draw on many more natural experiments than just comparisons among the five inhabited continents. Comparisons can also utilize large islands that have developed complex societies in a considerable degree of isolation (such as Japan, Madagascar, Native American Hispaniola, New Guinea, Hawaii, and many others), as well as societies on hundreds of smaller islands and regional societies within each of the continents. Natural experiments in any field, whether in ecology or human history, are inherently open to potential methodological criticisms. Those include confounding effects of natural variation in additional variables besides the one of interest, as well as problems in inferring chains of causation from observed correlations between variables. Such methodological problems have been discussed in great detail for some of the historical sciences. In particular, epidemiology, the science of drawing inferences about human diseases by comparing groups of people (often by retrospective historical studies), has for a long time successfully employed formalized procedures for dealing with problems similar to those facing historians of human societies.
In short, I acknowledge that it is much more difficult to understand human history than to understand problems in fields of science where history is unimportant and where fewer individual variables operate. Nevertheless, successful methodologies for analyzing historical problems have been worked out in several fields. As a result, the histories of dinosaurs, nebulae, and glaciers are generally acknowledged to belong to fields of science rather than to the humanities.[1] Why do islands with considerable degree of isolation provide valuable insights into human history?
(1) Isolated islands may evolve differently and this difference is of interest to us.
(2) Isolated islands increase the number of observations available to historians.
(3) Isolated islands, differing in their endowments and size may evolve differently and this difference can be attributed to their endowments and size.
(4) Isolated islands, in so far as they are inhabited, arouse curiosity about how human beings evolved there.[2] According to the author, why is prediction difficult in history?
(1) Historical explanations are usually broad so that no prediction is possible.
(2) Historical out comers depend upon a large number of factors and hence predictions is difficult for each case.
(3) Historical sciences, by their very nature, are not interested in a multitude of minor factors, which might be important in a specific historical outcome.
(4) Historians are interested in evolution of human history and hence are only interested in log term predictions.
(5) Historical sciences suffer from the inability to conduct controlled experiments and therefore have explanations based on a few long-term factors.[3] According to the author, which of the following statements would be true?
(1) Students of history are missing significant opportunities by not conducting any natural experiments.
(2) Complex societies inhabiting large islands provide great opportunities for natural experiments.
(3) Students of history are missing significant opportunities by not studying an adequate variety of natural experiments.
(4) A unique problem faced by historians is their inability to establish cause and effect relationships.
(5) Cultural anthropologists have overcome the problem of confounding variables through natural experiments.
asked in CAT
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156.
Each of the following questions has a paragraph from which the last sentence has been deleted. From the given options, choose the sentence that completes the paragraph in the most appropriate way.
[1] Characters are also part of deep structure. Characters tie events in a story together and provide a thread of continuity and meaning. Stories can be about individuals, groups, projects or whole organizations, so from an organizational studies perspective, the focal actor(s) determine the level and unit of analysis used in a study. Stories of mergers and acquisitions, for example, are common place. In these stories whole organizations are personified as actors. But these macro-level stories usually are not told from the perspective of the macro-level participants, because whole organizations cannot narrate their experiences in the first person.
(1) More generally, data concerning the identities and relationships of the characters in the story are required, if one is to understand role structure and social networks in which that process is embedded.
(2) Personification of a whole organization abstracts away from the particular actors and from traditional notions of level of analysis.
(3) The personification of a whole organization is important because stories differ depending on who is enacting various events.
(4) Every story is told from a particular point of view, with a particular narrative voice, which is not regarded as part of the deep structure.
(5) The personification of a whole organization is a textual device we use to make macro-level theories more comprehensible.
[2] Nevertheless, photographs still retain some of the magical allure that the earliest daguerreotypes inspired. As objects, our photographs have changed; they have become physically flimsier as they have become more technologically sophisticated. Daguerre produced pictures on copper plates; today many of our photographs never become tangible thins, but instead remain filed away on computers and cameras, part of the digital ether that envelops the modern world. At the same time, our patience for the creation of images has also eroded. Children today are used to being tracked from birth by digital cameras and video recorders and they expect to see the results of their poses and performances instantly. The space between life as it is being lived and life as it is being displayed shrinks to a mere second.
(1) Yet, despite these technical developments, photographs still remain powerful because they are reminders of the people and things we care about.
(2) Images, after all, are surrogates carried into battle by a soldier or by a traveller on holiday.
(3) Photographs, be they digital or traditional, exist to remind us of the absent, the beloved, and the dead.
(4) In the new era of the digital image, the images also have a greater potential for fostering falsehood and trickery, perpetuating fictions that seem so real we cannot tell the difference.
(5) Anyway, human nature being what it is, little time has passed after photography’s inventions became means of living life through images.[3] Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets; a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe - the only private lady detective in Botswana - brewed red bush tea. And three mugs - one for herself, one for her secretary and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really nee? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance.
(1) But there was also the view, which again would appear on no inventory.
(2) No inventory would ever include those, of course.
(3) She had an intelligent secretary too.
(4) She was a good detective and a good woman.
(5) What she lacked in possessions was more than made up by a natural shrewdness.asked in CAT
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