2014
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-soc-071913-043303
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Caste in Contemporary India: Flexibility and Persistence

Abstract: The caste system, its salient characteristics, and its subtle and more obvious transformations, coupled with its persistence and pervasiveness, have been central to studies of Indian society. This review provides a specific view of caste and its transformations with an emphasis on the socioeconomic or labor market dimension. Such a perspective is particularly crucial as one of the distinctive features of caste is the inheritance of occupations. A major argument of modernization has been the increasing movement… Show more

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Cited by 95 publications
(75 citation statements)
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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%
“…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%
“…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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“…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%