Caste, Knowledge, and Power

Caste, Knowledge, and Power PDF Author: Sunandan K. N.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009281917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Caste, Knowledge, and Power investigates the transformations of caste practices in twentieth century India and the role of knowledge in this transformation and in the continuing of these oppressive practices. The author situates the domination and subordination in the domain of knowledge production in India not just in the emergence of colonial modernity but in the formation of colonial–Brahminical modernity. It engages less with the marginalization of the oppressed castes in the modern institutions of knowledge production which has already been discussed widely in the scholarship. Rather, the author focuses on how the modern colonial–Brahminical concept of knowledge invalidated many other forms of knowing practices and how historically caste domination transformed from the claims of superiority in acharam (ritual hierarchy) to the claims of superiority in possession of knowledge.

Caste, Knowledge, and Power

Caste, Knowledge, and Power PDF Author: Sunandan K. N.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009281917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Caste, Knowledge, and Power investigates the transformations of caste practices in twentieth century India and the role of knowledge in this transformation and in the continuing of these oppressive practices. The author situates the domination and subordination in the domain of knowledge production in India not just in the emergence of colonial modernity but in the formation of colonial–Brahminical modernity. It engages less with the marginalization of the oppressed castes in the modern institutions of knowledge production which has already been discussed widely in the scholarship. Rather, the author focuses on how the modern colonial–Brahminical concept of knowledge invalidated many other forms of knowing practices and how historically caste domination transformed from the claims of superiority in acharam (ritual hierarchy) to the claims of superiority in possession of knowledge.

Caste, Knowledge, and Power

Caste, Knowledge, and Power PDF Author: K. N. Sunandan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781009273138
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Caste, Knowledge, and Power explores the emergence of knowledge as a measure of human in the colonial and casteist contexts in twentieth-century Malabar, India. It undertakes a comparative study of two caste communities in Malabar-Asharis (carpenter caste) and Nampoothiris (Brahmins) for their varied interactions with and intervention in the emerging colonial forms of knowledge production. The author argues that the caste location determined not only the presence or absence in the system of knowledge production, but also the cognitive process of knowing and hence the very idea of what is considered as knowledge. In other words, it engages less with the marginalization of the oppressed castes in the modern institutions of knowledge production, which has already been discussed widely in the scholarship. Rather, the author focuses on how the modern colonial-brahminical concept of knowledge invalidated many other forms of knowing practices and how historically caste domination transformed from the claims of superiority in acharam (ritual practices) to the claims of superiority in possession of knowledge. In short, the book investigates the transformations of caste practices in twentieth-century India and the role of knowledge in this transformation and in the continuation of these oppressive practices. It also diverges from the tradition of considering colonial power as the determining force and actions of the communities as response to this power. The author situates the domination and subordination as interaction and indicates that, in India, colonial modernity emerged as colonial-brahmanical modernity. The periodization-twentieth century-is also indicative of moving away from the dominant classification of colonial and postcolonial, and hence posits the argument that postcolonial practices of knowledge are a continuation of the colonial-brahmanical practices formed in the first half of the twentieth century"--

Beyond Caste

Beyond Caste PDF Author: Sumit Guha
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004254854
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
'Caste' is today almost universally perceived as an ancient and unchanging Hindu institution preserved solely by a deep-seated religious ideology. Yet the word itself is an importation from sixteenth-century Europe. This book tracks the long history of the practices amalgamated under this label and shows their connection to changing patterns of social and political power down to the present. It frames caste as an involuted and complex form of ethnicity and explains why it persisted under non-Hindu rulers and in non-Hindu communities across South Asia.

Caste

Caste PDF Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0593230272
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

Knowledge-Power/Resistance

Knowledge-Power/Resistance PDF Author: Vinod Kumar Rawat
Publisher: Partridge Publishing
ISBN: 1482839164
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Schools, Colleges, Universities, and Educational institutes, that is, knowledge factories, apart from producing self-governing citizens, and skilled docile workers, function as minute social observatories that indirectly monitor their families. Michel Foucault delineates power in terms of Pastoral (church and salvation), Sovereign (visible and verifiable), Disciplinary (invisible and unverifiable), Bio-power (reproduction and individualization), Psychiatric (normal and abnormal), and Governmentality (sovereignty, discipline, and government). By applying Foucaults theory, the research investigated the relevance of the Francis Bacons popular dictum, Knowledge is Power, and Dr. B. R. Ambedkars final words, Educate, Agitate, Organize. The insights of the research may benefit the seekers and disseminators of knowledge in understanding the subtle operative modes of the government-capitalist nexus and in advocating appropriate resistance against the pathologies of power.

Caste, Communication and Power

Caste, Communication and Power PDF Author: Biswajit Das
Publisher: SAGE Publishing India
ISBN: 9391370985
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Caste, Communication and Power explores communication and the constitution of caste in Indian society. Intimately connected, both communication and caste are determined by historical developments. The book looks at communication as a lens to study caste and power relations, with its immense potential to shape perception and affect ground reality. It also studies the evolution of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of caste and power relations, and maps their emergence from communicative resources and practices. These communication practices are inevitably linked to the social structure, with their reliance on symbolic forms of self-expression, often revealing the underlying ideological attitudes. The book studies this interface of culture and media, evaluating the caste question and the associated power relations in terms of modes of communication practised in the society.

Transaction and Hierarchy

Transaction and Hierarchy PDF Author: Harald Tambs-Lyche
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351393960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
In this volume, the author challenges a number of widely held cultural stereotypes about India. Caste is not as old as Indian civilization itself, and current changes are no more radical than in the past, for caste has evolved throughout its history. It is not a colonial invention, nor does it result from weak state control. There is no single form of Indian kingship, and power relations, fundamental as they are for understanding Indian society. Nor do Indian villages conform to a single type, and caste is as much urban as rural. Only in a regional ‘local’ perspective can we view it as a ‘system’. Caste does offer space for the individual, though in a particular Indian mould, and Hinduism does not provide for an integration of castes through ritual. In short, social organization varies widely in India, and cannot provide the key to the specificity of caste. This must be sought in the way society is imagined, the models of society current in Indian thought. Of course as mentioned above, there is no single model: Brahmins, kings, and merchants among others have all produced alternative models with themselves at the centre, vying for hegemony, while facing contesting models held by subalterns. Still, a hierarchical mode of thought is hegemonic and largely explains why Indians see their social stratification differently from people in the West. The volume will be indispensable for scholars of South Asian Sociology and Culture.

Islamic and Caste Knowledge Practices among Haalpulaaren in Senegal

Islamic and Caste Knowledge Practices among Haalpulaaren in Senegal PDF Author: Roy Dilley
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474467733
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The Mosque and the termite mound -- Ranks and categories: the emergence of a Haalpulaar social division of labour -- Historical origins and social pedigrees of craftsmen and musicians: genealogies of power and knowledge of the wild -- The white and the black: ideology and the rise to dominance of the Islamic clerics -- Accommodationist Sufi Islam and rites of passage: tensions and ambiguities -- The witch-hunter and the marabout: competing domains of knowledge and power -- The power of the word: the oral and the written -- Islamic reformers, Islamists and the Muslim community.

Castes of Mind

Castes of Mind PDF Author: Nicholas B. Dirks
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400840945
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

The Interpretation of Caste

The Interpretation of Caste PDF Author: Declan Quigley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book provides a radical alternative to prevailing theories of caste which either build on indigenous rationalizations of the Brahman's supremacy or reduce hierarchy to material factors. Drawing on a wide range of historical and ethnographic sources as well as four years' field work, Declan Quigley proposes a comparative approach which locates caste-organized communities in the context of complex agrarian societies generally. At the heart of caste, he argues, there is a tension between the centralizing forces of kingship with its associated ritual and the decentralizing forces of kinship. Dr Quigley believes that it is this tension, rather than Brahminical ideology, which generates the characteristic patterns of hierarchy and the preoccupation with purity and pollution. In making kingship central to the explanation of caste, this book calls for a considered reexamination of the theory of caste proposed by A. M. Hocart over half a century ago, and offers an elegant and wide-ranging comparative interpretation of facts which have until now eluded satisfactory explanation.