"India is a land of various ethnic and tribal groups. Cultural diversity is the unique feature of North-East India exhibited by a large number of tribal communities in the region. Owing to ill-planned economic development policies, there is evident regional imbalance and backwardness in all spheres of life in the north-eastern states. Poverty, lack of employment opportunities and aimless political process have resulted in gross dissatisfaction among the population. Ethnicity has been growing rapidly, and it has brought together the marginally differentiated ethnic groups as a strong united force, which continues to have frequent conflicts with the local governments on various issues of ethic identity and independence. There has been a lack of true information regarding the social structure of various ethnic groups of the North-East India. This book therefore tries to explore the genesis, factors, causes, consequences of the growth of ethnicity, ethnic movement, state formation and inter-ethnic relations, and its impact on the social structure. The role of economy, politics and religion has also been considered as wider causes of the movements in the north-eastern states.Several theoretical issues have been discussed in this eighteen-chapter book, which will be useful for policy makers and policy analysts, sociologists and social anthropologists."

The New Ethnicity is characterized more by a cutting of roots than a cultivation of them, particularly among descendants of recent European immigrants to America. The authors hold that the American Dream, including its melting pot imagery, was sought by immigrants from Ireland or eastern, central, and southern Europe, not imposed by xenophobic WASPs. Thus The Ethnic Imperative is partly a rejoinder to apologists for the New White Ethnic movement, partly a sympathetic critique of the movement and, by extension, of all movements premised on the biosocial nature of ethnicity. Three centuries of Euro-American history are reviewed in order to establish a psycho-social base from which to view the New Ethnicity as what La Barre calls a "crisis cult." A distinction is made between current ideological ethnicity and the prior unselfconscious behavioral ethnicity. The latter subsumes the preservation of intracultural values while the former involves a rejection of the American Dream. The liberating American Dream is contrasted with the equally powerful--and often constraining--doctrine and practice of American Conformity. The post-World War II period of liberation for recent Americans is viewed psychoanalytically as the triumph of the "son" generation, while the assassination of idealized leaders symbolized loss of faith in the American Dream. Mounting rebelliousness by youths and Blacks led many "white ethnics" to embrace neo-fundamentalisms and neo-orthodoxies. The traditional "Southern" ethos of localism and separatism, with which the New White Ethnicity is often compared, is shown as a recurring nationwide rationalization of caste or race position--no matter how unrewarding that position may be. La Barre calls it "one-downmanship." Implicitly, The Ethnic Imperative is a brief for the American Dream of "E pluribus unum." And as Weston La Barre says of the authors in his foreword, "their ideas will have a still wider bearing in the future world village."

The study of racial and ethnic relations has become one of the most written about aspects in sociology and sociological research. In both North America and Europe, many "traditional" cultures are feeling threatened by immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia. This handbook is a true international collaboration looking at racial and ethnic relations from an academic perspective. It starts from the principle that sociology is at the hub of the human sciences concerned with racial and ethnic relations.

Dr. N.K. Das had the privilege of conducting systematic social anthrpological research in Nagaland and other regions of North-eAst during 1976-88. Based on the material thus collected, Dr. Das has critically examined the ethno-historical and socio-political processes and factors causing ethnic conflict in sensitive North-East India. Using anthropological insight and historical anlaysis of pre-state segmentary social system among the Zounuo-Keyhonuo Naga, and examines the processes of state formation among the Ahom, Kachari, Meitei, Jaintia, Koch, Karbi and Khasi tribes in time and space dimensions. Other crucial subject matters discussed in this pioneering work are 'concept of tribe' fallacy of unilineal descent theory', 'matriliny to patriliny', 'peasantization','Inequality', `slavery', `social-stratification',`sanskritzation', `Christinaity', `Naga', `Mizo', `(Udayachal) Assam', `GNLF', `TNV', `Karbi',`Bodo' movements, and cultural revivalism.

Presenting an analysis of American assimilation theory Bash attempts to dissect the concept and what it has come to mean in the United States. After tracing the "natural history" of the assimilation notion and later its theoretical elaboration, he explores far more theoretical linkages by way of concept formation and theory construction in the area of racial and ethnic group relations.