Memoirs of a Village: A Theoretical and Methodological Reading of M.N. Srinivas's The Remembered Village

Abstract

This paper is an exposition of theoretical and methodological perspectives adopted by M.N. Srinivas in his study The Remembered Village. It thus reviews The Remembered Village in relation to the adequacies and inadequacies of structural-functionalism and ethnographic field-work practice in social science tradition. In doing so it suggests Marxian and subaltern perspectives as alternative paradigms to understand social reality. Unlike the structural-functional framework, the Marxian and subaltern perspectives allow to reflect on aspects like exploitation and domination of the subordinate groups and conflict of interests as an inherent feature of relationships between dominant and subordinate groups. The omissions of The Remembered Village on the account that it adopts a structural-functionalist framework and presents an elitist understanding of social reality however, does not decry its sociological and anthropological relevance.