 Dear students, today, we are going to talk about society. Society is generally defined as the collection of people who share a common culture in a collective territory. But it is more interesting to understand that do societies have been the way these are in today? Do societies have always been the way they are? For example, today's society is today's society. Or do societies keep changing? Ever since the human history began, the human history has started, we see that there have been a lot of changes and changes in the society. And the society has evolved from simple to complex. Well, thousands of years ago, societies were definitely small and were sparsely populated and technology was very limited at that time. But by the passage of time, the competition for scarce resources increased because there were a lot more populations as compared to the older society. And definitely we achieved a lot more technologies than our previous generations. So, as technologically societies have advanced and become complex, the networks of relationships within the societies have also become complex. So, by keeping their complexities in mind, we can distinguish societies differently. So, today we have arrived at a global society which is far more technologically advanced and far more complex than the previous societies. So, sociologists generally distinguish six types of societies based on the complexity of their social structure that to what extent we have complex social structures. As we see that in the simple societies, the structures are not much complex. There are not distinctive deviance of labor. Many people live in the middle of the world, but there are many differences in the way they work. In modern societies, you see that there are distinctive deviance of labor. Everyone has their own specialized task. Whereas in simple societies, there is no specialized deviance of labor. One person can be involved in multitasking to perform tasks. And then the amount of overall cultural accumulation. That means that when we talk about cultural accumulation, we see that how far the culture of society is rich. The richer the culture is, the complex that society becomes. The complexity of society also very much depends on the richness of that culture. And then the level of the technology. Obviously, simple societies in the past in history, societies were not technologically well-equipped because human beings have not been that much advanced. They didn't learn to use technology at that time. So they evolved from simple technologies to the very much complex technologies that we can observe and we can see around us today. And then they are foraging like starting from the way they are engaged in different tasks. For example, in the simple societies, most of the time they have been engaged to satisfy their basic human needs including security, food, shelter. So starting from that, like pastoral societies, horticultural societies and agricultural societies as compared to what we see in today's industrialized or post-industrialized societies. So in this evolution of society, we will discuss further details in which way horticultural societies, hunter and gather societies evolve from there to post-industrialized societies. The steps involved in the evolution of these processes and the functions and characteristics of these societies will be discussed in the next modules.