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Hierarchy Purified: Notes on Dumont and His Critics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Steve Barnett ,
Lina Fruzzetti  and
Akos Ostor
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Extract

The importance of Louis Dumont's work—both for specialists in Indian studies and for general social science theory—is by now obvious. Yet, since the publication of the initial volumes of Contributions to Indian Sociology (old series, coedited with D. Pocock), Dumont's work has been subjected to intensive criticisms that do not simply suggest he is wrong about a particular ethnographic fact, but rather that his approach is wrongheaded, that his starting points are idealist, biased (in favor of upper castes), or irretrievably tied to “French intellectual currents.”

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Articles
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , August 1976 , pp. 627 - 646
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1976

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References

1 Fruzzetti, Ostor, & Barnett, ”Problems Kinship and Caste in Two Regions of India” (i. there a structure to North Indian kinship terminol ogy?—a discussion of the Bengali case (F & O); 2 The seed and the earth—a cultural analysis of kin ship in a Bengali town (F & O); 3. Coconuts and gold—relational identity in a South India caste (B); and 4. The cultural construction of the person Bengal and Tamilnadu (B, F,&O)), to appear Contributions to Indian Sociology [hereafter CIS], n.s. 10 (1976). We acknowledge the impact of David M. Schneider's cultural studies on our own analyses of kinship and caste.

2 Barnett, S., ”Approaches to Changes in Caste Ideology in South India” in Stein, B. (ed.), Essays on South India (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1975); ”Urban Is As Urban Does: Two Incidents on One Street in Madras City, South India,” Urban AnthropologyGoogle Scholar, II, 2 (1973), pp. 129–59; (with M. R. Barnett), ”Contemporary Peasant and Post-Peasant Alternatives in South India: The Ideas of a Militant Untouchable” in The Annals of the N.Y. Academy of Sciences, 1973, pp. 385–410.

3 A. Ostor, “Puja: Methodological and Analytic Notes on an Ethnographic Category”; “Durga Puja: A Study in the Symbolism of the Goddess Cult in Bengal”; “The Festival of the Great Lord: Symbol and Sequence in Siva's Gājari”; “The Bengali Bazaar: An Essay in Cultural Analysis”; “Society and Revolution in Bengal,” manuscripts.

4 Fruzzetti, “The Idea of Community Among West Bengal Muslims” in Bertocci, P. (ed.), Prelude to Crisis: Bengal and Bengal Studies in 1970 (Mich-Associaigan State Univ. Asian Studies CenterGoogle Scholar, South Asia Occasional Paper No. 18, 1972; “Conch-shell Banvergles, Iron Bangles: An Analysis of Women, Marriage and Ritual in Bengal Society,” Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Minn., 1975; “Ritual Status of Muslim Women in Rural India” in Jean Smith (ed.). Status of Muslim Women (forthcoming, 1976).

5 Marriott & Inden, “Towards an Ethnosociology of Hindu Caste Systems,” IXth Int'l Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, No. 2206, 1973; Marriott & Inden, “Caste Systems” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1974. Marriott, “Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism,” Association of Social Anthropologists, Symposium on Transactional Analysis, Oxford, 1973; revised vergles, sion 1974 [hereafter referred to as Marriott 1974].

6 Marriott 1974, pp. 1–2 and passim; also Marriott-Inden 1973 and 1974, passim.

7 We shall not try to systematize the contributions of Marriott and Inden. The above generally characterizes the three extant pieces, though they are far from being uniform—the diachrony of the corpus seeming to result in more and more extreme claims, Yet the coded-substance approach of the first does seem to be much like the ethnosociology of the second and the Hindu transactionism of the third. There are some differences, however we cannot go into them here; the underpinnings of the argument are uniform, and so are our strictures in their appliterizes cation.

8 In the following, we shall restrict our comments to the one published Marriott-Inden opus; but we submit that the central claims of the other two papers are open to criticism in the same terms.

9 Marriott-Inden 1974, p. 982.

10 Ibid., p. 982.

11 Ibid., p. 983.

12 Marriott 1974, but also Marriott-Inden 1973.

13 Marriott-Inden 1974, p. 984.

14 Ibid., pp. 984–85.

15 Ibid., p. 986.

16 Ibid., p. 984.

17 “The Caste System Upside Down, or The Not-So-Mysterious East,” Current Anthropology, XV, 4 (1974), pp. 469–93.

18 Ibid., p. 469.

19 Ibid., pp. 474–77.

20 For a similar view, see M. Moffatt, “Untouchables and the Caste System: A Tamil Case Study,” CIS, n.s. 9 (1), 1975, pp. 111–22.

21 G. Berreman, “Caste in India and the United States,” American Journal of Sociology [hereafter AJSL, LXVI, 2 (1960), pp. 120–27; and Hindus of the Himalayas, Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1963. Also Mencher 1974.

22 “Introduction: What Should We Mean By Caste?” in Leach, E. (ed.), Aspects of Caste in Ceylon, South India and Northwest Pakistan, Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology, No. 2, 1960.Google Scholar

23 Marriott, “Caste Ranking and Food Transaction: A Matrix Analysis,” in Singer & B. Cohn, M. (eds.), Structure and Change in Indian Society, Chicago: Aldine, 1968.Google Scholar

24 Davis, A., Gardner, B. B. & M. R. (W. Lloyd Warner, Director), Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1941Google Scholar; Ghurye, G. S., Caste and Race in India, London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1932Google Scholar; Berreman 1960 (n. 21 above); and F. Barth, “The System of Social Stratification in Swat, North Pakistan” in Aspects (n. 22 above).

25 , Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, Mark Sainsbury (trans.), Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970, p. 341.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., p. 214.

27 See Berreman 1963, Mencher 1974, and Barth 1960.

28 Berreman 1963, p. 198. Kroeber, A. L., “Caste,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1930), Vol. 3, pp. 254–57.Google Scholar

29 , Dumont, CIS, 5 (1961), p. 22.Google Scholar

30 An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944.Google Scholar

31 , Dumont, CIS, 5, p. 25.Google Scholar

32 Berreman 1960 and 1963.

33 “Race and Caste, A Distinction,” AJS, L 1945), p. 360.

34 Caste, Class and Power, Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1965Google Scholar; and Castes: Old and New, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1969.Google Scholar

35 “Are There Castes in India?” Economy and Society, 3 (1973), pp. 89–111.Google Scholar

36 “The Elections in England—Tories and Whigs” in Engels, Marx, On Britain (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), p. 353.Google Scholar

37 For Marx, New York: Pantheon, 1972.Google Scholar

38 Mattison Mines, writing on South Indian Muslims (“Muslim Social Stratification in India: The Basis for Variation,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, XXVIII, 4 [1972], pp. 333–49) arrived at conclusions similar to those stated in this and earlier Fruzzetti-Ostor papers.

39 See Vreede-de Stuers, C., Parda: A Study of Muslim Women's Life in Northern India, Assen: van Gorcum & Comp., 1968.Google Scholar

40 Sociological studies of Muslim social institutions and the division of the Muslims into two strata—Ajlaf and Ashrafs—have helped create a distorted view of Muslims. For example, Zarina Ahmad (”Muslim Caste in Uttar Pradesh,” The Economic Weekly, XIV, 7 (Feb 1962), pp. 325–36), while criticizing Ghaus Ansari's paper (“Muslim Caste in Uttar Pradesh: A Study of Culture Contact,” special issue of The Eastern Anthropologist, Lucknow, XIII, 2, 1960) on this division into two groups, concludes with a similar error. His analysis of Muslim stratification as based on “caste analo thropology, gous,” endogamous, hereditary groups, and on a specific style associated with a distinct ritual status in a hierarchical system, is far from reality. He insists that the “real units of social stratification are caste analogous” and that day-to-day relationships bevan tween the various individuals in any local community are determined by their membership in t h e caste analogue, rather than the broad categories of Ajlaf and Ashrafs (p. 273), yet we are not told how the Hindu and Muslim systems differ. What of the ritual status for the Muslims? How is it different from that of the Hindus?

41 Further discussion of this and of the subject of n.40 will be found in Fruzzetti 1976.