Cross-Cultural TOC

IS THERE CASTE OUTSIDE OF INDIA? Morton Klass

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ccording to the ancient Greek traveler Megasthenes (at least as his account has come down to us in the writings of others), when he visited South Asia about 300 B.C.E. the society was divided into seven castes and one hundred and eighteen tribes. He further observed, so we are told by classical Greek historians, that in all of the sub-continent “all the Indians are free and not one of them is a slave.”1 It would be nice, of course, if we had a clear idea of what Megasthenes meant by the terms we today translate as tribe, caste, and slave—but we don’t. All we know is that Megasthenes, in his writing about India, is reported to have used a term that scholars today translate as castes, and a term that we now translate as tribes, while he found no sign of something he called by a term we now translate as slaves. In over two thousand years, that problem has not gone away; we are still arguing about what castes are and how they differ from tribes, and whether slavery—or even racism—bears any resemblance to caste. The extreme positions in the debate are: (a) caste is a peculiar institution, unique to South Asia and specifically to Hindu India, or (b) caste is a term to be used for something that occurs in every stratified society in the world. Let us, therefore, focus first on caste in contemporary Hindu India—and then try to see whether anything like that is found in other societies. That way, we can sidestep the problem of what caste meant to Megasthenes, and simply determine what caste means today. Most scholars (anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, etc.) agree that the Hindu population of India is divided up into thousands of distinct hereditary groups of people—known as castes—the members of which are forbidden, on pain of expulsion, to marry outside the group (and expulsion is a serious punishment, as we shall see later). Anthropologists call such a rule a “rule of endogamy.” The only way you join an endogamous group is by being born into it—in other words, by being the child of two members. Interestingly, some castes (though not many) do permit members to marry outside the group in special cases, and some even accept recruits. Many scholars believe that Indian castes also exhibit another rule, one prescribing the “correct” occupation of members—or at least forbidding them to engage in occupations unacceptable to their caste. People who claim this is a characteristic of caste, or anyway of most castes, usually do not specify that the rule, where it does exist, pertains for the most part to men: Most women, of

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most castes, primarily housewives and mothers, do not have specialized occupations. In any case, there have always been castes lacking restriction on occupational specialization—in other words, permitting members to do anything that would gain them a livelihood. In modern times, furthermore, there are castes in which the rule, though theoretically present, is ignored by most members without fear of punishment. Most important, however, this focus on restriction to special or unusual occupations tends to obscure the fact that most castes—that is, most people in India—are simply engaged in agricultural pursuits. A particularly important aspect of caste for most scholars of the subject is hierarchy. It is generally agreed that the castes are arranged in some sort of order from high to low, with the caste called Brahman at the top of the hierarchy. There is considerable dispute about this, though—some, for example, would argue that there are four, and only four, levels in the hierarchy. These would be the classic four varnas: Brahman, Ksatriya, Vaisya, and Sudra. Other scholars will argue that these are ancient, no longer applicable, categories—that there are really many different local hierarchies to be observed, and that often the only thing they have in common is that Brahmans are invariably on top. There are even those who claim that Brahmans are not always at the top, and that Brahman position, or even Brahman presence, is not all that important. Finally, scholars have noted that there are, or may be, other rules specific to particular castes—one of the most common being a restriction on eating with (or even accepting food or water from) members of other castes, at least of castes ranked lower in the local hierarchy. For many of the scholars who focus on “prestation” (exchange of food or drink), caste becomes a kind of game for determining not hierarchy but relative social position (You accept water from us, but we don’t accept water from you, so our caste must rank higher than yours). When, therefore, an inquiry is made into whether castes may be observed in societies other than Hindu India, the above are the features that are looked for, though not always with the same degree of interest. Rarely, if ever, for example, has anyone pointed to a rule forbidding commensality (eating together) as demonstrating the presence of a caste system. And nobody, as far as I am aware, ever looked for Brahmans in other societies or rejected the use of caste in describing social divisions just because there were no Brahmans to be found—though, as we shall see, the

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presence of a priesthood inter-relating with kingship has been suggested as a possible indicator of a caste-like system. For the most part, those who use the word caste for groups outside of Hindu India are usually responding to the presence of one feature, alone—a rule of endogamy exhibited by large social bodies (that is, not just by families or villages, or even clans) living together in a complex society. In South Africa, for example, for much of this century the rules of apartheid forbade marriage between “whites” and “blacks”—and that was sufficient for some to call South Africa a caste society. Others, however, take note of another supposedly characteristic feature of caste—occupational restriction. The Burakumin of Japan, for example, who were once butchers, and were restricted from engaging in other occupations—and were usually unacceptable as marriage partners by other Japanese—are often referred to as a caste. Again, some nineteenth century scholars argued that the guild system of medieval Europe was a kind of incipient caste system. A guild (or gild) was a voluntary association of all those engaging in a particular activity (tanners, weavers, dealers in a particular commodity such as wool, etc.) for the purposes of protecting the interests of the members and maintaining the standards of the trade or craft. It was likely that many, if not most, marriages took place between children of members—just as most apprentices were likely to be the sons of members. Nevertheless, marital restriction does not seem to have been a feature of medieval guilds, and it was always possible—if difficult—for a boy from outside the guild to become an apprentice and, ultimately, a master and full member of the guild.2 Behind much of this debate—does caste derive from endogamy or from occupational specialization?—was the question of how the caste system of India first came into existence. Thus, if you believed that the system emerged from the efforts of “Aryan” conquerors to prevent their descendants from intermarriage with supposedly “inferior races,” then the rule of endogamy was clearly the defining feature of caste. If, on the other hand, you believed that the system derived from the efforts of specialists such as priests (in other words, members of what might have started as guilds) to keep their lucrative practices restricted to their own descendants, then you focused on rules of occupational exclusivity. This was a debate of considerable moment at the end of the

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nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, but today comparatively few scholars believe that either of these explanations of origins is tenable. Nevertheless, the beliefs that caste is primarily a system of endogamous marriages, or, alternatively, a system of occupational specializations, continue to have independent lives of their own. My own view is that the caste system of Hindu India is, to begin with, a socio-economic organization for the production and distribution of goods and services, most particularly those having to do with crop production and management.3 I call it socio-economic because it is manifested in the form of social bodies—the ones we call castes—found in villages and other rural settings, all interacting with one another during the course of the agricultural cycle. India is—and has been, as far back as we have any records or knowledge—a stratified society, some might say one of the most stratified societies on our planet. The huge population of the subcontinent depends for subsistence upon the grain harvest, primarily of rice and wheat. Agricultural land is not freely available to all, of course; throughout history a relatively small proportion of the population has controlled access both to land for cultivation and to the resultant crops. In other words (as in most stratified societies), some people own or control the important resources (in this case, land), and the rest of the people have to seek access to the resources and/or the food in any way they can. This has meant that the Indian rural (agricultural) population has traditionally been divided into three main categories: those who own or control crop land, those who provide the labor involved in producing the crop, and those who provide services—agriculturally related, or personal—for the agriculturalists. One might argue that a similar situation is to be observed in any stratified agricultural society, but there are important differences. In societies such as those of Europe and the United States, any person with sufficient wealth may purchase land and thus become a farmer; any poor man without other sources of subsistence may hire himself out as a field laborer; any person with sufficient skill or enterprise may set up shop as a barber or blacksmith. In South Asia, from ancient times until quite recently, no individual, as such, could do any of those things. Rather, the individual invariably belonged to one or another of the named, discrete and organized social groups to which the term caste has

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been given. Each caste provided an avenue (in some cases more than one) whereby the individual members (usually the males) could gain access to food and other necessities. As we have noted, these castes constituted most of the rural agricultural population. Apart from those supervising production, and those performing agricultural labor or caring for animals, many castes offered special skills—those of blacksmiths, carpenters, goldsmiths, barbers, potters, weavers, etc. A wide range of special services were castespecific; some, such as those performed by priests, carried considerable prestige, while others (scavenging, cleaning latrines, etc.) were considered demeaning, even “unclean” or “polluting.” Whatever the activity—however prestigious or demeaning, however lucrative or poverty-inducing, whether it resulted in continuous hard labor or much leisure time—it served, as we have noted, as an avenue of access for the members of the caste engaged in it to food and necessities. That is, one gained such access by being a member of—in a sense, a representative of—a particular caste. When kings or temples or other possessors of large tracts of land sought people to grow crops on the land, they would contact the leaders of farmer castes or managerial castes. Members of the latter, in turn, sought laborers or blacksmiths or barbers from the castes providing such skills or activities. Payment to all was by appropriate shares of the crop at harvesttime: Some received large shares, and the poorest laborers received daily “handfuls of rice.”4 Thus, if you were a member of a barber caste you supported your family by cutting the hair of, and providing other such grooming services for, the wealthy households of your village. If you were a member of a priestly caste, you performed marriages and religious services. Whatever your activity and whatever your station in life, you had, at minimum, the comfort of knowing that you were a member of a group with a recognized and accepted right to engage in that activity. Members of other castes, seeking such a service or activity, would approach only members of your caste. And if there was a conflict—for example, over appropriate recompense, between you and the farmer for whom you worked—you knew the leaders of your caste would protect you, if necessary by threatening to deny your caste’s service to your employer. The caste, in other words, could serve its members as employment office and even as union or guild. These were its economic dimensions—but the caste was much more than that.

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The caste (or, customarily, the local subdivision of the caste, a circle of interacting families scattered over many villages in a given region) constituted, in addition, the social universe for its members. These were the people among whom one sought spouses for one’s children; these were the people with whom one shared marriage and birth celebrations, and who joined with one in times of mourning. These were one’s circle of relatives, one’s only dependable friends and allies. The caste not only protected its members and provided them with a closed social universe, but also functioned to maintain itself over time, and thus by extension it contributed, along with all the other castes, to the maintenance of the total system. The manifestation of this functioning was what outsiders observed as the rule of endogamy. Suppose there were no such rule? Suppose any member of a caste was free to marry whomever he or she liked? Western observers, traditionally, have focused on the extremes: Suppose a Brahman, a member of the highest-ranked caste, married an “untouchable”? Such a violation of the rules would certainly be dramatic, but other cross-caste marriages are more likely to occur—and are equally unacceptable! A Brahman who married a Sweeper girl would certainly be expelled from his caste—but if, say, a young male Barber eloped with the daughter of the Blacksmith, both young people would be expelled from their respective castes just as quickly and just as remorselessly as the above-mentioned Brahman would be. “Out-casting,” or expulsion from the caste, usually meant expulsion from much of your social universe; no member of your former caste would eat with you, invite you to weddings or funerals, or, most disturbing of all, consider one of your children as a possible spouse for his children. You could survive without friends and relatives to visit with, you could live without parties and life-crisis celebrations, but what would your children do when they grew up and sought mates? After all, everyone in your region belonged to one caste or another; no caste permitted marriage with a member of another caste or with a “casteless” person. Thus, the caste, as a body, controlled the behavior of its members because everyone in the society belonged to castes; there was nowhere to go for spouses for one’s children if one were expelled from one’s caste. Well, almost nowhere. As we have noted, hierarchy was also a feature of the caste system. The castes at the very bottom of a

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local hierarchy might, on occasion, accept as a new member someone who had been out-casted—though usually only if he came from a high-ranked caste. The Brahman who married a Sweeper might therefore find refuge (and a source of mates for the children) in some “untouchable” caste—but that only points up the desperation, the lack of choice, facing the out-casted person, and thus, by extension, the health and strength of the caste system and its rule of endogamy. In cases where intermarriage did not threaten the coherence of the caste and the caste system, it did indeed occur. In Kerala, for example, Nambudri Brahmans (who were patrilineal) permitted younger brothers of heirs to estates to marry Nayar women. The children of such unions were acceptable to the Nayars, who counted descent only through women. Since they could never be counted as Brahmans, however, such children could pose no threat to the descendants of the senior line. Some students of Indian society insist that caste is a social phenomenon, others that it is essentially ideological. As the foregoing indicates, I am one of those who insist on giving attention to the economic dimensions of the institution. I would argue, however, that caste in India is a multi-faceted, extremely complex, phenomenon: It is a system for producing and distributing goods and services; it is a social arrangement of the members of a large, complex and stratified society; it is a reflection of a sophisticated belief system and a pervasive set of values. The ideological system reflected is that of Hinduism, the followers of which believe that the human soul is immortal, while the human body is mortal; thus, the soul (or atman) is fated to migrate, after the death of the individual, to another person (at birth), and so on without end—unless in some incarnation it achieves a cessation of the “wheel” of rebirth. How you live your life is up to you, Hindus believe, but the choices you make determine what your life will be like in your next incarnation. There is a “Law of Karma” in the universe: Those who lead wicked or selfish lives will enter upon a life of suffering when next reborn, and those who were good will be rewarded. The traditional belief (that is, until the present century) was that among the rewards and punishments was position in the caste system—those whose souls were purest would be reborn as members of the highest-ranked castes; those whose souls were impure or “unclean” (because of the life they had lived) would be reborn into a low-ranked or “untouchable” caste.

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In addition, according to the anthropologist Louis Dumont, the entire South Asian social and ideological structure reflected a fundamental organizing principle of “inequality” or “hierarchy,” to be observed in all human relations, but manifesting itself most particularly in what is called the “caste system.”5 From the foregoing discussion, it might seem that caste is a unique phenomenon, peculiar to the South Asian subcontinent and inseparable from all the factors that go to compose Indian society. Many scholars, indeed, do feel that way, but there are others who see important elements—indeed, even diagnostic ones—as present in other and very different societies in other parts of the world. As we have noted, those who see occupational specialization as the key feature of caste consider the medieval guilds of Europe to be caste-like, or even incipient castes. Others, who see restrictions on marriage and social intercourse in general as the defining characteristics, point to South Africa under apartheid or the southern United States under the restrictive “Jim Crow” and other segregation laws and practices from the end of the Civil War to the 1960s. Thus, for example, the sociologist John Dollard, in his mid-century study of “Southerntown,” found the community divided into two distinctive groups labeled “whites” and “Negroes.” Dollard distinguished class (differential social position, found among both whites and Negroes) from caste (reflecting the social separation of whites from Negroes).6 The issue in this case, then, is whether the so-called races in the United States are essentially equivalent to what are called castes in South Asia. This issue precipitated a heated exchange between Gerald D. Berreman—who thinks they are—and Oliver C. Cox, who had long thought they were not. Berreman is of course aware of those South Asianists who see caste as peculiar to India. He argues, however, that for “purposes of cross-cultural comparison” it is useful, even “necessary,” to define caste in broader terms: “For these purposes a caste system may be defined as a hierarchy of endogamous divisions in which membership is hereditary and permanent.”7 For Berreman, this definition simply sets out an “ideal type”: It establishes, in other words, a continuum of systems—some close to, some far away from, the ideal—along which different societies may be placed for the purpose of cross-cultural comparison and analysis. Thus, for example, he finds it possible, using this definition, to explore the similarities and differences between India and the United States:

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In both situations there is a genuine caste division, according to the definition above. In the two systems there are rigid rules of avoidance between castes, and certain types of contacts are defined as contaminating, while others are non-contaminating. The ideological justification for the rules differs in the two cultures, as do the definitions of the acts themselves, but these are cultural details.8

One response to the above, when it was first published in 1960, was by Oliver C. Cox, a sociologist who had long contended that “race” in the United States was very different from “caste” in India.9 Berreman printed Cox’s letter in Caste and other Inequities, along with his rejoinder. Cox’s first objection was that while Berreman’s definition of the caste system was specifically in terms of hierarchy, there are in fact only two races in the American South. Though the relationship between them was unequal, such a relationship, he argued, hardly constituted a hierarchy. Second, Berreman’s approach focuses on the interactions between aggregates (large, amorphous, internally unorganized social bodies) and thus ignores what for Cox is more significant about South Asian castes—the complex interactions between and among many discrete, endogamous, internally organized castes. In his view, too, Indians of all castes, including those called untouchable, accept the system and have no desire to change it. Cox notes other differences, implying, for example, that there is a genetic basis to “belonging to a racial group by birth.” He concludes: The caste system is not a simple societal trait which may be universalized by “cross-cultural comparison.” Rather, it constitutes the social and institutional structure of a distinct pattern of culture. To identify it with race relations in the South seems to be no less an operation than to identify the social structures of capitalism and Hinduism.10

Berreman, in his rejoinder, gives particular attention to what is probably the weakest part of Cox’s argument—that race is a biological category while caste is a social one. He points out that it is generally agreed by anthropologists and sociologists today that that both are really social categories. He also notes that untouchables in India are not as accepting of their low status as Cox seems to think, and he cites examples of low-caste protest

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and demands for equality. He acknowledges certain differences between Hindu hierarchy and Negro-white relations, but insists the differences are not important enough to invalidate the comparison, concluding: I attempted to identify certain recurrent social processes in rigid systems of social stratification which I believe can usefully be called “caste systems” in recognition of their common features and in the interests of comparative social science.11

Berreman’s fundamental concern is with inequality (as the title of his book indicates): For him caste is simply one example of social inequality. As he notes in a later chapter, caste may differ in certain respects from class and race and estate, but the crucial point for Berreman is that they all reflect the presence of stratification—which (again, for Berreman) means, invariably, institutionalized social inequality. This last is the subject of particular interest to him, and it justifies, in his view, his effort to deal with caste cross-culturally. He ends the book with the observation: “The reduction or elimination of social stratification is a rich dream indeed.”12 Other writers who see caste as a cross-cultural phenomenon have very different concerns. Declan Quigley, for example, who also sees caste as one form of stratification, proposes that a caste society differs from other stratified societies (specifically Western or European complex agrarian nations) in two essential ways: “The first is that caste depends on the relative failure of centralization and the parallel persistence of kinship in shaping social institutions. The second is the expression of common culture through ritual rather than through the written word.”13 Thus, for Quigley, the political dimension of stratification is the most important—as opposed to the social dimension, the aspect of most concern to Berreman. The underlying issue, for Quigley, is how order is maintained in stratified societies. This is normally done, he believes, through a combination of secular and religious authority: The primary function of the king is to provide order. Through the sacrifice, which he commands, he continually regenerates the order of the universe: he controls the gods and natural forces which are otherwise uncontrollable. Ritual is essentially a question of order; order is essentially a

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question of ritual; he who controls the ritual controls the order.14

Quigley derives both his interests and his interpretation of caste (as he is careful to note) from an earlier writer, A. M. Hocart, and he specifically cites Hocart’s ringing statement: “The temple and the palace are indistinguishable, for the king represents the gods.”15 For both Hocart and Quigley, therefore, a caste society is, in effect, any stratified state in which (a) a strong centralized power—in the sense of a divine, all-powerful king—has never emerged, so that (b) an independent priesthood (such as the Brahmans) has emerged, arrogating to itself control over sacrifice and therefore “order” and (c) maintaining itself by “familial” (i.e., endogamic) control of sacred texts and even sacredness itself.16 In other words, in a society in which the king is not strong enough, or important enough, to “represent the gods” a powerful and independent priesthood is likely to come into being. If it does, the members of the priesthood will want to maintain their power and independence by restricting membership to their own descendants. Once such a “priestly caste” has come into existence, so the theory runs, people in other professions and occupations will imitate the priests, and a “caste society” emerges.17 I tend to be, temperamentally, an eclectic. 18 By all means, choose the theoretical frame that best suits an investigation of the questions of greatest interest to you. Inequality is surely a topic of monumental importance, and explorations of the interrelationship of power and religion clearly have merit, and so all such approaches have much to teach us. It is interesting to observe, for example, that India rarely exhibited strong centralized states until the arrival of Islam and the emergence of the Mughal Empire— during which caste was denigrated and the Brahman priesthood was down-graded. Again, with the emergence during this century of a strong and independent India, inter-caste marriage has become legally possible (though still quite rare) and strong political efforts have been mounted to do away with, or at least modify, social and religious inequalities.19 Still, there are other aspects to caste. In my own case, the attention I give to the socio-economic dimensions of the South Asian caste system undoubtedly reflects my concern that we do not overlook the crucial importance of acquiring the necessities of life. I am not convinced, as some are, that how we acquire and

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distribute goods and services determines everything else in our society and culture—but surely it constitutes a basic and therefore very influential dimension of all human activity and concern. In my view, therefore, many scholars of South Asian society err in giving insufficient attention to the economic and ecological dimensions of caste.20 In any event, I have urged that we pay more attention to caste as one kind of system for acquiring and distributing the food supply in a stratified and complex food-producing society; that is, through the efforts of representatives of occupationally specialized groups. Obviously, such societies differ and much variation is possible and likely, but what is diagnostic of caste, at least for me, is that the members of the society articulate with the system not as individuals but as representatives of discrete autonomous bodies offering or controlling—or sometimes simply saddled with—particular occupational contributions. Where else in the world do we find such a system? Herbert S. Lewis has described something very much like this kind of caste among some of the societies of East Africa.21 Again, Candelario Saenz has described a caste-like socio-economic system for the Twareg (once Tuareg) of the Sahara. According to Saenz, while pastoralists constitute the dominant Twareg group, also present in the society are “widely dispersed groups of endogamous and nomadic Twareg smiths known as Inadan.”22 Saenz explores in detail the web of economic, social and ideological relationships between Inadan smiths and the pastoralist Twareg, and concludes: The Inadan blacksmith, as well as other feared and despised itinerant smiths, are organized into groups defined through endogamy and common ancestry as well as through their possession of particular emblems, symbols and other groupidentification paraphernalia ….23

Saenz’s term for people such as Inadan smiths is boundary people—and he notes that “all Inadan from birth to death are boundary people, by virtue of their association with their social group.”24 This sounds, at least to me, intriguingly like a caste in India, and I am even more intrigued by Saenz’s next comment: “There are other boundary groups in Twareg society.”25 Alas, his discussion of them is all too brief. Clearly—or maybe not so clearly—caste is an enormously

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complex system of social inequality, reflecting the interplay of religious and secular authority, and providing for the acquisition of food and the interchange of goods and services upon which the society depends. The study of caste raises questions about the nature and presence of rules of marriage restriction, about social and religious impurity, about the ways people interact with one another in economic and social exchanges, about the relations between political and religious entities, and even about the impact of notions about death and rebirth on social structure. Students of South Asia have, in their observations on the caste system, touched on these and more issues. We see indications of this kind of caste in accounts of societies in Africa. It may be that if we begin to look we will find it elsewhere—in Southeast Asia, perhaps, or even in Europe and Europe-derived societies. Of course, those who wish to seek caste solely as systems of inequality, or as reflections of the absence of centrality in stratified societies (and Inaden smiths could serve for both of these inquiries) should by all means do so. The only requirement I would impose is that one be consistent and clear in one’s definition of and approach to caste—in which case, by all means seek illumination of the problem in hand by comparing caste in India with whatever seems equivalent elsewhere.

NOTES 1. Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, The Classical Accounts of India (Calcutta: Firma Mukhopadhyay, 1960), pp. 220, 224. (Megasthenes’ own writings have all been lost; all we have of his work are quotations in the accounts of other writers.) 2. This was all part of the nineteenth century debate about how European society evolved from more “primitive” forms, while other less fortunate societies (such as that of India) remained “frozen” and unchanging. See, for example, Henry S. Maine, Village Communities in the East and West (London: John Murray, 1871); Henry B. Baden-Powell, The Origin and Growth of Village Communities in India (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1908); Denzil C. J. Ibbetson, Panjab Castes (Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, Panjab, 1916). 3. Morton Klass, Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH System (1980; reprint New Delhi: Manohar, 1993). Those who become interested in the question of how the Indian caste system came into existence will find there are a lot of other books on the subject. See, particularly, Herbert H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of India (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1908); and John H. Hutton, Caste in India: Its Nature, Function, and Origins (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1969). See Morton Klass, “The South Asian Mode of Production,” Man in India 71, no. 1 (1991): 67–88. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., “Anchor Books,” 1957). For a similar approach, see Buell G. Gallagher, American Caste and the Negro College (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938). Gerald D. Berreman, Caste and other Inequities: Essays on Inequality (Meerut, India: Folklore Institute, distributed by Manohar Book Service, New Delhi, 1979), p. 2. As the title indicates, this volume is a collection of essays on the subject of caste, and the citation is from his first chapter, originally an essay entitled “Caste in India and the United States” (emphasis in original). Ibid., pp. 4–5. See Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948); Oliver C. Cox, “Race and Caste: A Distinction,” American Journal of Sociology 50 (March 1945): 360. Berreman, Caste and other Inequities, pp. 14–16. Ibid., pp. 16–18. Ibid., pp. 288–309. Declan Quigley, The Interpretation of Caste (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 145. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid. See also Arthur M. Hocart, Caste: A Comparative Study (New York: Russell & Russell, 1950), p. 68. Quigley claims that he differs from Hocart in a few particulars, but as far as I can determine the foregoing is a fair summation of both their views. The interested reader is urged to consult and compare their respective writings. Hocart, Caste, pp. 74, 80, 120. Hocart believes that the traditional political and ritual systems of Fiji and Samoa showed signs of this kind of “incipient caste” formation. See, for example, the chapter entitled “An Argument for

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

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Eclecticism” in my book, Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System (1980; reprint New Delhi: Manohar, 1993). Many books have been written on this subject. Two good ones to start with are Taya Zinkin, Caste Today (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); and Pauline Kolenda, Caste in Contemporary India: Beyond Organic Solidarity (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1985). The debate over the place and utility of the cow in the Indian eco-system is a sharp example. For a much-needed dissection of the views of those who thought the utilization of cattle in India could only be approached as a religious phenomenon, see Marvin Harris, “The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle,” Current Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1966): 51–56. Herbert S. Lewis, “Historical Problems in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 96 (1962): 504–511. Candelario Saenz, They Have Eaten Our Grandfather! The Special Status of Aïr Twareg Smiths (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1991), p. 1. Ibid., p. 212. Ibid. (emphasis added) Ibid.

SUGGESTED READINGS Dumont, Louis. Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. A classic exploration of the nature of hierarchy in the Indian caste system. Klass, Morton. Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System. 1980; reprint New Delhi: Manohar, 1993. The most recent attempt to explain the nature and origins of the caste system. Kolenda, Pauline. Caste in Contemporary India: Beyond Organic Solidarity. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1985. An exploration of how the caste system has responded to modern, political, economic, and social pressures. Leach, Edmund R., ed. Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon, and Northwest Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962. A collection of papers on caste by different anthropologists. Srinivas, M. N. Caste in Modern India and Other Essays. Bombay: Asia

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CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH Publishing House, 1962. An exploration of the nature of contemporary caste from the perspective of the leading Indian anthropologist.

Cross-Cultural TOC