Download or read book Homo Hierarchicus written by Louis Dumont and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Caste Hierarchy and Individualism written by R. S. Khare and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume in the Oxford in India Readings in Sociology and Social Anthropology series is a well-rounded and rigourous analysis of the study of caste and hierarchy in India. The essays herein are a contextualized sociological appraisal of the work of Louis Dumont. They constitute Indian responses to Dumont's path breaking work Homo Hierarchicus, and discuss the logic, application and problems associated with his influential structural and comparative method in sociology. The essays in Section I provide the reader with accessible summaries and overviews of Dumont's work. Section II is a critical appraisal of aspects of his works, while Section III reflects the general shift in Indian sociology and social anthropology towards postcolonial debates and discourses. The final section includes excerpts from Dumont's own writings, along with comments on the issues of method, theory, and analysis. With contributions from important scholars of Indian sociology and anthropology, the reader is the second volume after Social Stratification (in the series) to look at the issue of caste. This high profile volume will feed into courses on Indian sociology across universities and be of particular interest to students of sociology and social anthropology in post graduate and M.Phil level courses, in addition to other scholars of caste and political sociology.
Download or read book Caste written by Isabel Wilkerson and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #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.
Download or read book Transaction and Hierarchy written by Harald Tambs-Lyche and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-09 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Caste Hierarchy and Individualism written by Ravindra S. Khare and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis Dumont, 1911-1999, French anthropologist; contributed articles.
Download or read book Essays on Individualism written by Louis Dumont and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis Dumont's Essays on Individualism is an ambitious attempt to place the modern ideology of individualism in a broad anthropological perspective. The result of twenty years of scholarship and inquiry, the interrelated essays gathered here not only trace the genesis and growth of individualism as the dominant force in Western philosophy, but also analyze the differences between this modern system of thought and those of other, nonmodern cultures. The collection represents an important contribution to Western society's understanding of itself and its place in the world.
Download or read book The White Tiger written by Aravind Adiga and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-04-22 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE The stunning Booker Prize–winning novel from the author of Amnesty and Selection Day that critics have likened to Richard Wright’s Native Son, The White Tiger follows a darkly comic Bangalore driver through the poverty and corruption of modern India’s caste society. “This is the authentic voice of the Third World, like you've never heard it before” (John Burdett, Bangkok 8). The white tiger of this novel is Balram Halwai, a poor Indian villager whose great ambition leads him to the zenith of Indian business culture, the world of the Bangalore entrepreneur. On the occasion of the president of China’s impending trip to Bangalore, Balram writes a letter to him describing his transformation and his experience as driver and servant to a wealthy Indian family, which he thinks exemplifies the contradictions and complications of Indian society. Recalling The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, The White Tiger is narrative genius with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation—and a startling, provocative debut.
Download or read book Castes of Mind written by Nicholas B. Dirks and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-09 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Caste Entrepreneurship and the Illusions of Tradition written by Geir Heierstad and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caste, Entrepreneurship and the Illusions of Tradition is an ethnographic study of the potters of Kolkata’s Kumartuli, an analysis of their lives and the related commodification and instrumentalization of caste. This group of artisans turned artists do not display passive responses to colonial and capitalist encounters but engage actively with the modern and economic developments of society at large, redefining the concept of caste identity in the process. Caste, Entrepreneurship and the Illusions of Tradition suggests a new academic direction for the study of modern India, and of caste in particular, through an empirically grounded portrayal of the synthesis of traditional categories and contemporary realities.
Download or read book INDIA S NEW CAPITALISTS written by Harish Damodaran and published by Hachette India. This book was released on 2018-11-25 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It?s no secret that certain social groups have predominated India?s business and trading history, with business traditionally being the preserve of particular `Bania? communities. However, the past four or so decades have seen a widening of the social base of Indian capital, such that the social profile of Indian business has expanded beyond recognition, and entrepreneurship and commerce in India are no longer the exclusive bastion of the old mercantile castes. In this meticulously researched book ? acclaimed for being the first social history to document and understand India?s new entrepreneurial groups ? Harish Damodaran looks to answer who the new `wealth creators? are, as he traces the transitional entry of India?s middle and lower peasant castes into the business world. Combining analytical rigour with journalistic flair, India?s New Capitalists is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the culture and evolution of business in contemporary South Asia.
Download or read book Hierarchy and Value written by Jason Hickel and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalization promised to bring about a golden age of liberal individualism, breaking down hierarchies of kinship, caste, and gender around the world and freeing people to express their true, authentic agency. But in some places globalization has spurred the emergence of new forms of hierarchy—or the reemergence of old forms—as people try to reconstitute an imagined past of stable moral order. This is evident from the Islamic revival in the Middle East to visions of the 1950s family among conservatives in the United States. Why does this happen and how do we make sense of this phenomenon? Why do some communities see hierarchy as desireable? In this book, leading anthropologists draw on insightful ethnographic case studies from around the world to address these trends. Together, they develop a theory of hierarchy that treats it both as a relational form and a framework for organizing ideas about the social good.
Download or read book Un common Cultures written by Kamala Visweswaran and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Un/common Cultures, Kamala Visweswaran develops an incisive critique of the idea of culture at the heart of anthropology, describing how it lends itself to culturalist assumptions. She holds that the new culturalism—the idea that cultural differences are definitive, and thus divisive—produces a view of “uncommon cultures” defined by relations of conflict rather than forms of collaboration. The essays in Un/common Cultures straddle the line between an analysis of how racism works to form the idea of “uncommon cultures” and a reaffirmation of the possibilities of “common cultures,” those that enact new forms of solidarity in seeking common cause. Such “cultures in common” or “cultures of the common” also produce new intellectual formations that demand different analytic frames for understanding their emergence. By tracking the emergence and circulation of the culture concept in American anthropology and Indian and French sociology, Visweswaran offers an alternative to strictly disciplinary histories. She uses critical race theory to locate the intersection between ethnic/diaspora studies and area studies as a generative site for addressing the formation of culturalist discourses. In so doing, she interprets the work of social scientists and intellectuals such as Elsie Clews Parsons, Alice Fletcher, Franz Boas, Louis Dumont, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, W. E. B. Du Bois, and B. R. Ambedkar.
Download or read book The Poison in the Gift written by Gloria Goodwin Raheja and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1988-06 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poison in the Gift is a detailed ethnography of gift-giving in a North Indian village that powerfully demonstrates a new theoretical interpretation of caste. Introducing the concept of ritual centrality, Raheja shows that the position of the dominant landholding caste in the village is grounded in a central-peripheral configuration of castes rather than a hierarchical ordering. She advances a view of caste as semiotically constituted of contextually shifting sets of meanings, rather than one overarching ideological feature. This new understanding undermines the controversial interpretation advanced by Louis Dumont in his 1966 book, Homo Hierarchicus, in which he proposed a disjunction between the ideology of hierarchy based on the "purity" of the Brahman priest and the "temporal power" of the dominant caste or the king.
Download or read book The Historical Roots of Political Violence written by Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers the first comprehensive analysis of the wave of revolutionary terrorism in affluent countries.
Download or read book Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India written by David West Rudner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Rudner's richly detailed ethnographic and historical analysis of a South Indian merchant-banking caste provides the first comprehensive analysis of the interdependence among Indian business practice, social organization, and religion. Exploring noncapitalist economic formations and the impact of colonial rule on indigenous commercial systems, Rudner argues that caste and commerce are inextricably linked through formal and informal institutions. The practices crucial to the formation and distribution of capital are also a part of this linkage. Rudner challenges the widely held assumptions that all castes are organized either by marriage alliance or status hierarchy and that caste structures are incompatible with the "rational" conduct of business. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
Download or read book Caste as Social Capital written by R Vaidyanathan and published by Penguin Random House India Private Limited. This book was released on 2023-07-24 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many consider caste as an outdated institution, though it thrives in postliberalization India. That being the case, caste has only been studied from a religious, social and political angle. It is grudgingly accepted that caste has economic ramifications. For instance, the establishment and running of businesses tap into caste networks, both in terms of arranging finance and providing access to a ready workforce. Despite that, any study of this aspect has been limited to looking at caste groups in terms of their per capita income, their representation in various professions and other statistical details. Caste as Social Capital examines the workings of caste through the lens of business, economics and entrepreneurship. It interrogates the role caste plays in the economic sphere in terms of facilitating the nuts and bolts of business and entrepreneurship: finance, markets and workforce. Through this qualitative view of caste, an entirely new picture emerges, which forces one to view the ageold institution of caste in a new light.
Download or read book Practical Vedanta written by SWAMI VIVEKANANDA and published by Prabhat Prakashan. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practical Vedanta (Swami Vivekananda Motivational & Inspirational Book) by Swami Vivekananda: Immerse yourself in the teachings of Swami Vivekananda with Practical Vedanta, a motivational and inspirational book that draws upon the wisdom of Vedanta philosophy. Through practical insights and profound guidance, Swami Vivekananda offers readers a transformative approach to spirituality, self-realization, and living a purposeful life. Key Aspects of the Book Practical Vedanta: Vedanta Philosophy: Practical Vedanta introduces readers to the principles of Vedanta, a timeless philosophical tradition rooted in the ancient scriptures of India. Swami Vivekananda's teachings delve into the core concepts of Vedanta, including self-realization, the nature of existence, and the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. Practical Application: The book goes beyond theoretical discourse, providing practical guidance on how to integrate Vedanta principles into daily life. Swami Vivekananda offers insights on self-discipline, meditation, ethical living, and the cultivation of spiritual values, empowering readers to apply these teachings to enhance their personal growth and well-being. Motivation and Inspiration: Swami Vivekananda's words serve as a source of motivation and inspiration, encouraging readers to tap into their inner potential and awaken their spiritual consciousness. His teachings inspire individuals to live with purpose, embrace their innate divinity, and make a positive impact on the world around them. Swami Vivekananda was a revered spiritual leader and philosopher who played a pivotal role in introducing Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world. Known for his dynamic personality and profound teachings, Swami Vivekananda continues to inspire millions with his message of universal harmony, self-realization, and service to humanity. Practical Vedanta encapsulates his transformative wisdom and serves as a guide forthose seeking spiritual growth and a deeper understanding of life's purpose.
