SOCIOLOGY: ESSAYS ON APPROACH AND METHOD By André Beteille, Oxford, Rs 545 It is difficult, if not impossible, to give a short answer to the question: what is sociology? In seeking to explain what sociology is, one oscillates between general discussions on the scope, aims and methods of the discipline, and specific accounts of issues, processes and problems. André Betéille in his collection of essays has approached the question of what sociology is from both ends. As an intellectual discipline, sociology had a late start in India as compared to the West, and in this book Béteille is constantly in search of the uniqueness and novelty of research in Indian sociology. In the first part of the book, Béteille concerns himself with the relationship between sociology and social anthropology. In the West, the study of society and culture is generally divided into two halves: the study of other cultures like India or Africa is anthropology and the study of Western industrial societies is sociology. Béteille rejects such watertight compartmentalization of knowledge. According to him, in India, there has been a closer relationship and sociologists in their examination of the past in the present have to draw from anthropology. While coming to the question of methodology, Béteille is all in favour of the comparative method in sociology. According to him, our deepest insights into society and culture are reached through the comparison of similarities and differences. Religion, politics and economics form distinctive components as sociology's subject matter. The sociological approach to the study of religion is found not only in the works of sociologists like Weber and Durkheim, but also in the works of social anthropologists like Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard. One issue of consensus among all classical sociologists has been the need to keep value judgment separate from the judgment of facts. While sociology aims to be neutral and scientific, it can never become a positive science like physics or chemistry owing to the very complexity and subjectivity of its subject. Sociology in India starting from the Twenties has come a long way. But still, sociology in India, as in many parts of the world, is in need of renewal, feels the author. Indian sociologists have been inclined to use, somewhat mechanically and uncritically, the tools of enquiry and analysis developed in the West. Sociology has also suffered from the absence of empirical work by Indian sociologists on societies other than their own. Thus, without comparative orientation, Indian sociology tends to remain static. In a search for renewal and alternative frameworks of knowledge, there has been a wholesale rejection of 'post-Enlightenment modernity' in some quarters. Béteille warns that this will only harm sociology if it tries to turn its back on the solid ground of classical knowledge established in the last two hundred years. Béteille's concern for the future of sociology as a discipline will definitely get attention within the already established academic circle. Moreover, his critical portrayal of sociological research in India will prove to be a vantage point to new scholars and researchers.