What type of community is a nation?

It’s a sort of community easy to describe but hard to define. Easy to describe because many specific nations are founded on the basis of common cultural, historical and political institutions like a shared religion, language, ethnicity, history or regional culture. It is hard to define because there are a number of nations that do not share a single common language, religion, ethnicity etc. A number of languages, religions or ethnicities are shared in such nations. Eg. India, Alaska and the USA, Malvinas/Falkland islands and the U.K., Austria and Germany, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE. These show the difference between formation of nation. In recent times, there has been a one-to-one bond between nation and state. This is the reason, the term nation joins the state with a hyphen (-) i.e. Nation-state. Soviet union in the past was a state of (union of) different i.e. more than one hundred nations. A general tendency is being found in nations to work towards forming a state and that of representing a nation in the states.

It informs age group, place of that age group in the total population of a country, the place of living (viz village, town, city, mega-city, plains, plateau, desert, hill, mountains), economic status or class (Lower, middle or upper class), religion (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, Buddhism, Christianity), a caste or tribe (Brahman, Ksatriya, Vaisya, Sudra) or other social group (Bengali, Gujrati, Marathi, Pahari, tribal, Jat, lodh, munda, Kayastha, Yadav etc.), language (any one out of 22 languages scheduled and countless dialects). After this information one can work out the social relationships.

Thus, sociology tells about what kinds of groups or groupings there are in society, what their relationships are to each-other and what this might mean in terms of one's own life.

It becomes advantage when socialisation process at home is perfect or wholesome with cosmos-consciousness. This subject becomes easy for the students and they start taking keen interest ab-initio because of their learning through socialisation at the levels of home, peer groups, neighbourhood, colony as also the community and the institutions like school, hospital, health centre, post office etc. where they visit frequently with their parents, siblings and other children of the same age group. The disadvantage is that this prior knowledge can be a problem in order to learn sociology. We have to erase the state of our mind if prior learning is acquired from a particular view point or if it is below or self-centered. The beliefs and expectations about society and social relations being specific may delude us if is sallow or self-centered unsound and they are unscientific. In case, we not erase them, there is danger of being ours partial which will act as deterrent in understanding sociology.

It is a generalised process of thinking about oneself in context to geography. As the geographical locations are diverse, every individual is unique and diverse in the social map. Age boundary tells him what is his age? Who are his fellows? In which institutions (i.e. family, neighbourhood, community, peer group) he is related to, what is the economic status of his family? Calibre and quality that have given him identity with society? His religion and its scope, caste and its influence etc. These quaries will enable him to locate himself in the society and only then he can make the best use of his reflexivity or introspection which will finally lead him to the fair selection of his career and mode of living in an ideal manner adapted or accommodated to the society.

It is the way to fulfil some basic needs like hunger, shelter, protection and other biological urges. The structure of a human society is similar to the structure of a building, which has generally three components : (i) building material such as bricks, mortars, beams and pillars (ii) Arrangement of material in a definits order and (iii) unification of building material and that of definite order to make a building one unit, or wholesome structure. Likewise a building, a society consists of (i) males and females, adults and children, various occupational and religious groups and so on (ii) the interrelationship between various parts (viz. relation between husband and wife, that of parents and children and between various groups and finally (iii) all the parts of the society are put together to work as a unit. Thus, structure, function and system are interrelated and complementary concepts.