Caste in Contemporary India: Flexibility and Persistence

Vaid, Divya

doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-071913-043303

Cited by 95 publications

(75 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Untouchable since any member of a high caste who comes into contact with them is considered to be polluted and would have to undergo purification rituals to rectify this (Vaid 2014). There is also a sixth group of people in India who fall outside of these categories: the Adivasi are semi-nomadic people who live in remote areas and who were neither incorporated into traditional village society nor given a position in the caste system until the modern era.…”

Section: Castementioning

confidence: 99%

Variation in Caste Homophily Across Villages and Contexts in Rural India

Davidson¹

2018

Preprint

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This paper studies on caste homophily across seventy-five villages in rural Karnataka, India. Caste is conceptualized as a system of ethnic categories that map onto positions within the social structure of each village. Despite being a salient category across India, the caste structure is not uniform across villages, caste groups or network contexts. Using social network and demographic data collected by Banerjee et al. (2013) I investigate how caste homophily varies within villages across social contexts and between villages. Overall I find strong evidence of caste homophily across the majority of contexts; people tend to exchange resources and socialize with other people occupying a similar position in the caste order. However this varies across villages, relations, and groups. It appears to be strongest among higher caste groups, although it weakens with regards to the lending and borrowing of money, a vertical relationship between high and low castes. The lending of rice and kerosene and social relationships involving advice giving and important decisions are also particularly homophilous for both groups. This demonstrates how the strength of ethnic boundaries can vary based on the relational and spatial context.

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Section: Castementioning

confidence: 99%

Variation in Caste Homophily Across Villages and Contexts in Rural India

Davidson¹

2018

Preprint

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“…Caste and gender systems ascribe all members of society to a social position, and such systems limit opportunities for status attainment, especially for SC/ST (Beteille, 1969; Fürer-Haimendorf, 1982; Galanter, 1984; Omvedt, 1993) and women (Miller, 1989; Murthi et al, 1995; Jeffery and Basu, 1996). To elaborate, the Hindu caste system stratifies the society into four castes ( varna ) (Vaid, 2014; Desai and Kulkarni, 2008), each associated with a type of occupation: Brahmin (priests and teachers), Kshatriya (rulers and warriors), Vaishya (traders) and Shudra (artisans and manual laborers). 2 Scheduled castes, the lowest in the hierarchy, tend to be employed in the occupations (e.g., skinning animal carcasses; butchery of animals; removal of human waste; attendance at cremation groups; washing clothes; fishing) that are considered profane by non-SC members.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 2 Each of these castes is further stratified into many smaller sub-castes ( jatis ), and each sub-caste into even smaller sub–sub castes (Vaid, 2014). In practice, however, caste hierarchies have never been universally accepted as those being of any one type across a region, and they were never fully rigid at any given time (Desai and Kulkarni, 2008; Vaid, 2014).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Do scheduled caste and scheduled tribe women legislators mean lower gender-caste gaps in primary schooling in India?

Halim

Yount

Cunningham

2016

Social Science Research

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Despite India’s substantial investments in primary schooling, gaps in schooling persist across gender and caste—with scheduled caste and scheduled tribe (SC/ST) girls being particularly disadvantaged. The representation of SC/ST women in state legislatures may help to mitigate this disadvantage. Specifically, because of her intersecting gender and caste/tribe identities, a SC/ST woman legislator might maintain a strong sense of solidarity especially with SC/ST girls and women, and support legislative policies benefitting SC/ST girls. Consequently, for this reason, we expect that living in a district where SC/ST women represent in state legislatures in a higher proportion may increase SC/ST girls’ primary school completion, progression and performance. We tested this hypothesis using district-level data between 2000 and 2004 from the Indian Election Commission, the 2004/5 India Human Development Survey, and the Indian Census of 2001. As expected, the representation of SC/ST women in state legislatures was positively associated with SC/ST girls’ grade completion and age-appropriate grade progression but was apparent not SC/ST girls’ primary-school performance. SC/ST women’s representation in state legislatures may reduce gender-caste gaps in primary-school attainment in India.

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“…As a result, art suddenly became a commodity, an expression of wealth and new modern identity (Brosius 2012). This gave a boost to the newly emerging market without challenging the historically strong stratification system (Vaid 2014). These historical differences also have an effect on the different intensity of governmental involvement in arts.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ups and downs of art commerce: narratives of “crisis” in the contemporary art markets of Russia and India

Komarova

2017

Theor Soc

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This article develops an analytical framework to study the role of narratives in markets and argues that there is a relationship between the structure and composition of narratives produced by market actors and market dynamics. With respect to theory, the article bridges the perspectives that study markets as cultures and as fields and draws from the organizational studies approach to the analysis of narratives. Two empirical cases of the crises narratives in the emerging contemporary art markets of Russia and India illustrate the use of the framework. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with artists and art dealers as well as observations in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, New Delhi, and Mumbai conducted between April 2012 and June 2013. The article shows that there is a widely shared crisis narrative with a coherent structure in the Indian art market. In contrast, fragmented and contested stories that lack narrative structure dominate in the Russian art market. The analysis of the first case highlights the narrative structure and shows the productive work it does in the Indian market-it provides a moral justification of existing market norms and produces a perspective for the future. The analysis of the second case focuses on the context of narrative production and connects the conflicting interpretations of the crisis in the Russian art market to contested hierarchies and persistent uncertainty.Keywords Antenarrative . Indian art market . Market narrative . Market as culture . Narrative analysis . Russian art market Market actors tell stories: how they are better than their competitors, how a product is of an outstanding quality, how a company or industry is developing. These stories are aimed at customers, competitors, or even themselves (and researchers) and serve as sense-making tools. Exploring the production and circulation of meanings (Velthuis 2005;Zelizer 2010) or

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Caste in Contemporary India: Flexibility and Persistence

Cited by 95 publications

References 40 publications

Variation in Caste Homophily Across Villages and Contexts in Rural India

Variation in Caste Homophily Across Villages and Contexts in Rural India

Do scheduled caste and scheduled tribe women legislators mean lower gender-caste gaps in primary schooling in India?

Ups and downs of art commerce: narratives of “crisis” in the contemporary art markets of Russia and India

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