The Interpretation of Caste

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

Get Book Here

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.

The Interpretation of Caste

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

Get Book Here

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.

Caste

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

Get Book Here

Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES READERS PICK: 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY • 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 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, 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 Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Winner of the Carl Sandburg Literary Award • Dayton Literary Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist • 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.” 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, Isabel 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. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Annihilation of Caste

Annihilation of Caste PDF Author: B.R. Ambedkar
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168832X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

Get Book Here

Book Description
“What the Communist Manifesto is to the capitalist world, Annihilation of Caste is to India.” —Anand Teltumbde, author of The Persistence of Caste The classic work of Indian Dalit politics, reframed with an extensive introduction by Arundathi Roy B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. Ambedkar – a figure like W.E.B. Du Bois – offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system. The world’s best-known Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, responded publicly to the provocation. The hatchet was never buried. Arundhati Roy introduces this extensively annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste in “The Doctor and the Saint,” examining the persistence of caste in modern India, and how the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi continues to resonate. Roy takes us to the beginning of Gandhi’s political career in South Africa, where his views on race, caste and imperialism were shaped. She tracks Ambedkar’s emergence as a major political figure in the national movement, and shows how his scholarship and intelligence illuminated a political struggle beset by sectarianism and obscurantism. Roy breathes new life into Ambedkar’s anti-caste utopia, and says that without a Dalit revolution, India will continue to be hobbled by systemic inequality.

Castes of Mind

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

Get Book Here

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.

Capturing Caste in Law

Capturing Caste in Law PDF Author: Annapurna Waughray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317613635
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is about the legal regulation of caste discrimination. It highlights the difficulty of capturing caste in international and domestic law, and suggests solutions. Its aim is to contribute to the task of understanding how to secure effective legal protection from and prevention of discrimination on grounds of caste, and why this is important and necessary. It does this by examining the legal conceptualization and regulation of caste as a social category and as a ground of discrimination, in international law and in two national jurisdictions (India and the UK), identifying their complexities, strengths, limitations and potential. Adopting a broadly chronological approach, the book aims to present an account of the role of law in the construction of caste inequality and discrimination, and the subsequent legal efforts to dismantle it. The book will be of value to lawyers and non-lawyers, academics and students of human rights, international law, equalities and discrimination, descent-based and caste-based discrimination, minority rights, and South Asia and its diaspora. It will be a resource for legal practitioners and those in the public and non-governmental sectors involved in the implementation, interpretation and enforcement of equality law in the UK – the first European country to introduce the word "caste" into domestic equality legislation – and in countries with South Asian diasporas such as the USA.

From Hierarchy to Ethnicity

From Hierarchy to Ethnicity PDF Author: Alexander Lee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108489907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Hierarchy to Ethnicity discusses the origins of politicized caste identities in twentieth-century India, and how they evolved over time.

Homo Hierarchicus

Homo Hierarchicus PDF Author: Louis Dumont
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226169634
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 542

Get Book Here

Book Description
Louis Dumont's modern classic, here presented in an enlarged, revised, and corrected second edition, simultaneously supplies that reader with the most cogent statement on the Indian caste system and its organizing principles and a provocative advance in the comparison of societies on the basis of their underlying ideologies. Dumont moves gracefully from the ethnographic data to the level of the hierarchical ideology encrusted in ancient religious texts which are revealed as the governing conception of the contemporary caste structure. On yet another plane of analysis, homo hierarchicus is contrasted with his modern Western antithesis, homo aequalis. This edition includes a lengthy new Preface in which Dumont reviews the academic discussion inspired by Homo Hierarchicus and answers his critics. A new Postface, which sketches the theoretical and comparative aspects of the concept of hierarchy, and three significant Appendixes previously omitted from the English translation complete this innovative and influential work.

Caste and Buddhist Philosophy

Caste and Buddhist Philosophy PDF Author: Vincent Eltschinger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788120835597
Category : Buddhist philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age

Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age PDF Author: Susan Bayly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521798426
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book Here

Book Description
The phenomenon of caste has probably aroused more controversy than any other aspect of Indian life and thought. Susan Bayly's cogent and sophisticated analysis explores the emergence of the ideas, experiences and practices which gave rise to the so-called 'caste society' from the pre-colonial period to the end of the twentieth century. Using an historical and anthropological approach, she frames her analysis within the context of India's dynamic economic and social order, interpreting caste not as an essence of Indian culture and civilization, but rather as a contingent and variable response to the changes that occurred in the subcontinent's political landscape through the colonial conquest. The idea of caste in relation to Western and Indian 'orientalist' thought is also explored.

Western Foundations of the Caste System

Western Foundations of the Caste System PDF Author: Martin Fárek
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319387618
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book argues that the dominant descriptions of the ‘caste system’ are rooted in the Western Christian experience of India. Thus, caste studies tell us more about the West than about India. It further demonstrates the imperative to move beyond this scholarship in order to generate descriptions of Indian social reality. The dominant descriptions of the ‘caste system’ that we have today are results of originally Christian themes and questions. The authors of this collection show how this hypothesis can be applied beyond South Asia to the diasporic cultures that have made a home in Western countries, and how the inheritance of caste studies as structured by European scholarship impacts on our understanding of contemporary India and the Indians of the diaspora. This collection will be of interest to scholars and students of caste studies, India studies, religion in South Asia, postcolonial studies, history, anthropology and sociology.