Critically examine the drawbacks in assuming culture as an ‘integrated-closed’ system in understanding of contemporary society. (Answer in 250 words)

- Critically examine the drawbacks in assuming culture as an ‘integrated-closed’ system in understanding of contemporary society. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
Treating a culture as an integrated and closed system — a bounded whole whose parts fit consistently and which owes nothing to outside — was productive for a generation of fieldwork and is untenable as a description of any contemporary society.

Body
1. Where the assumption came from: Malinowski's functional integration and Radcliffe-Brown's social system modelled on the organism, with Benedict's configurational patterning alongside. It disciplined ethnography, replacing conjectural history with the demonstrable interconnection of institutions, and it suited the small, administratively enclosed units colonial fieldwork was given.
2. Its drawbacks: boundedness treats societies as what Eric Wolf called billiard balls, erasing the trade, conquest and labour migration that made them; assumed homogeneity conceals difference by caste, class, gender and generation; the model has no place for conflict, so Leach's Kachin oscillation and Gluckman's rituals of rebellion had to be added; and the ethnographic present freezes societies in a timeless tense.
3. What contemporary conditions expose: circular labour migration and diaspora, Appadurai's deterritorialised flows, media and mobile telephony, market penetration and Hannerz's creolisation leave no field site that is a container. Marcus's multi-sited ethnography is the methodological admission of this.
4. What survives: integration is worth retaining as an empirical question rather than a premise. Srinivas's Rampura is coherent without being closed — sanskritisation and westernisation are precisely mechanisms by which an outside enters.

Conclusion
The drawback is not the idea of pattern but the assumption of it. Anthropology should demonstrate the connections it finds and treat the boundary as something people make and defend, not something the analyst may assume.