BSOC 113 Solved Guess Paper 2026 for Sociological Thinkers II IGNOU BASOH

Sample Question 1 · Intellectual Influences on Radcliffe-Brown (Block 1 Unit 1, HIGH priority, last appeared June 2025, June 2024, June 2023)

Discuss the major intellectual influences which helped shape Radcliffe-Brown's brand of social anthropology. (20 marks)

Definition to open with: modern social anthropology, as Jain (1989) puts it, is woven from two strands, the fact finding empirical ethnographic tradition and the holistic analytical tradition. The first is British and American, the second is French and deeply shaped by Emile Durkheim. Radcliffe-Brown's work carries the stamp of both.

The field-work tradition

1. Cambridge climate. He studied at Cambridge during a very creative phase where teachers and students freely shared and challenged each other's views.
2. Rivers as mentor. He became the first student of Anthropology under W. H. R. Rivers in 1904. Rivers and Haddon had taken part in the Torres Straits expedition.
3. First field study. Under Rivers and Haddon he was initiated into fieldwork, and his first field studies of 1906 to 1908 dealt with the Andaman Islanders.
4. Malinowskian tradition. Under Bronislaw Malinowski, social anthropology insisted on first hand observation lasting a year or more, later called participant observation.
5. A lasting stamp. He became part of the new empiricist tradition of British scientific anthropology, an influence that stayed with him throughout his career.

The Durkheimian tradition and his conversion

1. Durkheim's book. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) had a deep impact on British scholars, and Radcliffe-Brown was one of them.
2. What it offered. In Kuper's words (1975) the tradition offered scientific method, the belief that social life is orderly and open to rigorous analysis, and detachment from individual passions.
3. Study of social facts. Durkheim asked scholars to study social facts objectively without preconceived notions. Society was for him a moral order and the collective conscience was central.
4. Sociology as science. Durkheim wanted sociology built on the lines of the natural sciences, and these ideas attracted Radcliffe-Brown.
5. The shift in his work. The ethnographer became a sociologist. Instead of gathering descriptive information he began analysing it with sociological concepts.

Conclusion. Both traditions together made his social anthropology. Fieldwork gave him solid facts and Durkheim gave him sharp concepts, and out of the mixture came his structural functional approach to society.

Sample Question 2 · Social Structure and Social Organisation (Block 1 Unit 1, HIGH priority, last appeared December 2025, June 2025, December 2024)

What is the meaning of social structure? How is it different from social organisation? Discuss. (20 marks)

Definition to open with: Radcliffe-Brown (1958) held that the concept of structure refers to an arrangement of parts or components related to one another in some sort of larger unity.

Social structure

1. Basic elements. The basic elements are human beings, and the arrangement of persons in relation to each other is the social structure.
2. Not an abstraction. Structure is not an abstraction but empirical reality itself. Persons in India are arranged into castes, so caste is a structural feature of Indian social life.
3. Look at groups. Structural features are found by examining social groups of all kinds, within which people are arranged into classes, categories and castes.
4. Dyadic relationships. A key structural feature is the arrangement of people into person to person relationships such as master and servant, or mother's brother and sister's son.

Social organisation

Social organisation is the arrangement of activities of two or more persons adjusted to give a united combined activity (Radcliffe-Brown, 1958).

Institutions, continuity and structural form

1. Institutions. An institution is an established socially recognised system of norms and behaviour patterns which defines how a person is expected to behave and how he may expect others to behave (1958).
2. Structural continuity. Individuals come and go but structure persists. Groups, classes and castes lose members by death and gain new ones by birth.
3. Structural form. Social structure is always in flux but the structural form is comparatively stable, reflected in widely observed social usages.
4. Basis of stability. Stability depends on how well integrated the parts are and how well they perform their special tasks, which are the functions of the parts of the system.

Conclusion. Structure means how persons are placed with each other and organisation means how their activities are arranged. Structure keeps changing but the structural form stays fairly stable as long as its parts keep doing their work.

Sample Question 3 · Mead on Language and the Development of Self (Block 2 Unit 4, HIGH priority, last appeared December 2025, December 2024, December 2023)

Discuss the role of language in the development of self according to G. H. Mead. (20 marks)

Definition to open with: mind arises through communication by a conversation of gestures in a social process or context of experience, not communication through mind (Mead, 1934). In Mind, Self and Society he shows that the human self is not inborn but learnt from others in early childhood through communication symbols.

How language builds the self

1. Language is gesture. The language we speak is a conversation of gestures and symbols happening continuously when people meet, communicate and act.
2. Wundt's insight. Mead credited Wilhelm Wundt for seeing the significance of gestures. The gesture of the first person acts as a stimulus for the second and calls out a response.
3. Significant symbols. Gestures become significant symbols when they implicitly arouse in the individual making them the same response they explicitly arouse in others (Mead, 1934).
4. Lower animals differ. When a dog barks, a second dog barks or runs away, but dogs do not understand the meaning of their gestures. The roar of the lion does not mean the same thing to the lion and its victim.
5. The vocal gesture. The critical importance of language lies in the fact that the stimulus can react upon the speaking individual as it reacts upon the other. If I shout do not walk, I hear my own gesture the way you hear it.
6. Reflective intelligence. Being aware of the reaction of others to one's own action is the essential condition, within the social process, for the development of mind.
7. Symbols indicate action. A symbol does not simply stand for an object, it defines it and indicates a response. The symbol bed also indicates the action of sleeping.
8. Role taking. Role taking is mentally assuming the perspective of another and imaginatively placing oneself in that person's position. Mead argues it is essential for the emergence of mind.

Conclusion. Language is the bridge between society and the self. Through significant symbols the child hears itself as others hear it, takes the role of the other, and grows a social self.

Sample Question 4 · Adorno on Culture as a Commodity (Block 3 Unit 8, HIGH priority, last appeared December 2025, June 2025, December 2024)

Why is culture a commodity according to Adorno? Explain with examples. (20 marks)

Definition to open with: everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself.

Why culture becomes a commodity

1. Art gets commodified. For Adorno and Horkheimer the culture industry involves commodification of art. Collectors buy art as investment and an artist counts as successful if the work sells high.
2. Commodity fetishism. Commodities are treated as neutral objects whose value seems to come from themselves, hiding the social relations behind them. Buying chocolate, we rarely think of cocoa from central Africa or South America where child labour is often employed.
3. Exchange value wins. Standardised cultural products are reduced to their exchange value instead of their use value.
4. A change of name. Adorno wrote that in their drafts they spoke of mass culture and replaced that expression with culture industry, because he did not want people to think it arises spontaneously from the masses.
5. Profit motive shifts. The culture industry transfers the profit motive to cultural forms, whereas true art should tend against purposiveness and reflect the human condition.

Products and process of the culture industry

1. Standardisation. Repetition is the essential characteristic. Unlike serious music, which is a concrete totality where omitting a detail means all is lost, popular music is about standardisation.
2. The formula film. The plot stays the same and only the context shifts, with the boy and the girl, a villain in the form of a strict family or an external force, and the happy resolution.
3. Standardised audience. Any person signifies only those attributes by which he can replace everybody else, and so he is interchangeable (Adorno, 1947).
4. Pseudo individualisation. A song hit must have one distinguishing feature and yet possess the complete conventionality of all others. Marketing calls this product differentiation.
5. Distraction thesis. Distraction is a correlate of capitalism, whose fears about unemployment, loss of income and war find their non productive correlate in entertainment.

Conclusion. Culture becomes a commodity because it is made for sale and not for reflection. Shows such as Kaun Banega Crorepati offer escape and pleasure while hiding real structural inequalities.

Sample Question 5 · Foucault on the Idea of Panopticon (Block 4 Unit 11, HIGH priority, last appeared June 2023)

What do you understand by the idea of panopticon? Explain it through modern surveillance systems with examples. (20 marks)

Definition to open with: panopticon is broadly understood as a method of surveillance and control for disciplining people (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison).

From spectacle to discipline

1. Earlier punishment. Punishment was visible on the body in full public view, for example the cutting of limbs.
2. Later punishment. Punishment shifted to disciplining and internal regulation, that is regulation from within, and to rehabilitation of social subjects.
3. New institutions. The new government no longer relied on torture and public hangings but controlled people through humane practices of discipline and surveillance in prisons, mental asylums, schools, workhouses and factories.
4. Compliant citizens. These institutions produced citizens who follow norms not under threat of punishment but because their behaviour is constantly sculpted until they internalise dominant beliefs.

Bentham's panopticon and modern surveillance

1. The design. Jeremy Bentham described a perfect prison with cells built around a central tower.
2. Purpose of the tower. The tower transmits a feeling among inmates that they are constantly being observed from it.
3. The uncertainty. Inmates cannot know whether anyone is inside the tower, yet they still have a sense of being observed.
4. Self regulation. People gradually internalise the structure and become agents of their own regulation, limiting their own power in accordance with social structures.
5. CCTV cameras. A modern CCTV camera might be broken, yet its placement at a strategic location makes you conscious of your behaviour.
6. Aadhaar card. In India the Aadhaar card uses unique identification of biometrics such as iris and fingerprints to create a database of citizens for wider electronic surveillance.

Conclusion. Power through panopticon is manifested in various methods of surveillance and exists in the structures and institutions of society. The watcher need not watch, the feeling of being watched is enough.