Studies in Social Anthropology in India have, by and large, concerned themselves with original traditional groups with identifiable cultural norms in non—urban settings. But with more and more urban development on the one hand and an awareness of the need to understand and improve the status of women on the other, nurses emerge as an important identifiable group in an urban setting. This study investigates the many conflicts that nurses face in their transformation from traditional upbringing to a modern occupation in an urban milieu and, in particular, examines the conflicts that emerge from the low status accorded to their profession.

The book critically examines the reductionist tendencies prevalent in contemporary thought and offers an alternative framework. It draws attention to the two dominant fallacies involved in reductionism: the ‘fallacies of fragments of knowledge’. The first is the fallacy of assuming that knowledge of reality is nothing but the knowledge of the fragments that constitute reality, and the second is the fallacy of assuming that the fragmentary knowledge derived from different specialized disciplines, if put together, will somehow yield an integrated picture of reality.