(a) Do you think that common sense is the starting point of social research? What are its advantages and limitations? Explain…

Common Sense as the Starting Point of Social Research

Common sense constitutes what Alfred Schutz termed the "natural attitude"—the unexamined, taken-for-granted stock of knowledge actors employ to navigate everyday life. As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explain, common sense represents sedimented, socially constructed meanings that make social reality coherent. Consequently, it inevitably serves as the primary starting point of sociological research. Max Weber’s method of Verstehen bridges common-sense understanding and scientific analysis by taking actors’ subjective meanings as the raw data for causal explanation. Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments demonstrated that social order is actively sustained through these shared, implicit common-sense assumptions.

The primary advantage of common sense lies in its empirical groundedness: it provides researchers with intuitive hypotheses, contextual familiarity, and direct access to lived experiences. However, its limitations are significant. Common sense is unsystematic, localized, and permeated by ideological biases that naturalize historical inequalities as "natural order." Unlike scientific sociology, it lacks comparative rigor, methodological falsifiability, and conceptual reflexivity. While social research must begin with common-sense constructs to understand human action, it must subject them to systematic empirical testing to build valid sociological knowledge.

Poverty as Social Exclusion: Dimensions and Mechanisms

Poverty is increasingly understood not merely as income insufficiency, but as a relational rupture. Amartya Sen reframes poverty as capability deprivation, while Graham Room conceptualizes social exclusion as the structural detachment of individuals and groups from mainstream social, economic, and political institutions.

This multi-dimensional process operates across distinct spheres: Economic dimension: Structural exclusion from secure labor markets traps individuals in precarious, informal work devoid of legal protections. Social dimension: Poverty generates acute network isolation, anomie, and relational shame, cutting individuals off from vital bridging social capital. Political dimension: Impoverished groups suffer systematic disenfranchisement and institutional neglect, illustrated by arbitrary urban slum evictions where informal dwellers lack property titles and administrative grievance redressal. Cultural dimension: Structural poverty entails deep stigmatization. In India, manual scavenging communities face an overlap of extreme economic deprivation and hereditary caste pollution, while development-induced displacement of Adivasi communities strips them of customary forest resources, eroding cultural identity and undermining statutory protections under the PESA Act, 1996.

Poverty therefore acts as social exclusion precisely because it converts material deficits into cumulative, intergenerational denial of citizenship and dignity.

Totemism and Animism: Comparative Analysis

Edward Tylor and J.G. Frazer conceptualized animism through an intellectualist lens, defining it as the belief in spiritual beings, souls, and personal spirits. They argued that early humans devised animism as a proto-scientific hypothesis to explain biological enigmas such as dreams, trances, and death. In contrast, Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, identified totemism among Australian Aborigines as the most elementary religious system. For Durkheim, totemism is the worship of an impersonal force symbolized by a clan emblem (the totem), establishing the fundamental division between the sacred and the profane.

Similarities: Both animism and totemism conceptualize non-empirical realities, generate systems of ritual practice, regulate human conduct, and bind individuals into moral communities that mediate human relationships with nature.

Differences: Animism focuses on individual psychological cognition, locating the origin of belief in dreams and individual souls. Totemism is inherently collective: the totem represents the clan itself, generated through "collective effervescence." Furthermore, Durkheim directly critiqued Tylor’s intellectualism, arguing that if animism were mere cognitive illusion, religion could not have sustained human societies across millennia. In totemism, religion worships society, fulfilling an objective social-integrative function rather than a psychological or speculative one.