The Poison in the Gift

Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village

Gloria Goodwin Raheja (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

300 Seiten

1988
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-70728-0 (ISBN)

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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.

Erscheint lt. Verlag	1.9.1988
Sprache	englisch
Maße	16 x 23 mm
Gewicht	709 g
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie ► Volkskunde
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-226-70728-8 / 0226707288
ISBN-13	978-0-226-70728-0 / 9780226707280
Zustand	Neuware