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review articles
is homo hierarchicus?
Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. E. VALENTINEDANIEL. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. xiv + 320 pp., tables, figures, index,
references. $29.95 (cloth).
The Untouchable as Himself: Ideology, Identity and Pragmatism among the Lucknow
Chamars. RAVINDRA S. KHARE. Cambridge Studies in Cultural Systems No. 8.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. xiv + 189 pp., tables,
notes, bibliography, index. $34.50 (cloth).
The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. ASHIS NANDY.
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. $16.95 (cloth).
When it first appeared in English translation in 1970, Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus
seemed to constitute a major invitation to think about South Asian society in a new way. The
book and its arguments have inspired many debates and polemics, and simply for the grandeur
of its aims it has yet to be surpassed. Yet, like many great works, it appears now not to have
been the inspirationfor a new way of thinking but the swan song for an older one.
There are two reasons for making this apparently perverse suggestion. The first is that Homo
Hierarchicus is likely to have been the last major work to make caste the central problematic
of Indiansociety. In this regard it completes a Western journey in the social scientific invention
of India whose immediate roots are in Max Weber's The Religion of India (1958l1909]) but
whose deeper roots go back to the Orientalist and proto-Orientalist conception of Indian so-
ciety.1 The second reason is that in placing hierarchy, as a concept, at the heart of a "sociology
for India," Dumont also composed an elegy and a deeply Western trope for a whole way of
thinking about India, in which it represents the extremes of the human capability to fetishize
inequality. Though Dumont regarded his work as an effort to capture the radical differentness
of caste, and thus of India, it is also subject to the Orientalist tendency to make one place or
society gristfor the conceptual mill of another.2
There are two signs of liberation from this sort of Orientalism. The first is the multiplication
of "anthropologies" of India, in many of which caste (and its conceptual leash-hierarchy) play
an appropriatelyrestricted role. The second symptom is the steady increase in works that deal
with self-making and culture-making in India, without capitulating to the hegemony of hier-
archy as a dominant image. The three books under review in this essay are importantefforts to
capture aspects of self, society and culture in India, and are crucial steps forward in the decon-
structionof caste as the central problematic of Indian society, and of hierarchy as its most com-
pelling trope. All three are by native South Asians, two of whom (both anthropologists) teach
In Ashis Nandy's The IntimateEnemy: Lossand Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, we find
a major new critical voice in the analysis of colonialism as a cultural, epistemological, and
psychological battleground. Nandy, trained originally as a psychologist (with a special interest
in politics), has recently emerged as a major critic of modern science, bureaucracy, and poli-
tics. In particular,he has come to be associated with an activist effortto formulate "alternative"
sciences to those of the dominant post-EnlightenmentEuro-Americanparadigm and has begun
to generate a radical (though distinctly non-Marxist)critique of the relationship between states
and culture, with particularreference to India. In all these regards, he stands at the center of a
group of theorists and writersbased principally in Delhi (includingJ. P. S. Uberoi, RajniKothari,
Shiv Vishvanathan, and the members of the collective centered around the activist journal Lo-
kayan)who are engaged in constructing a powerful alternative to current ideologies about the
connection between culture, science, and politics in modern life.
Though there are many strands to this critique and Nandy represents only one voice among
others, central to his own contribution is the effort to provide a moral and political basis for the
resistance of marginal, local, indigenous ways of knowing and living to the forces of the modern
state and its cultural apparatus. Nandy's is notably not a relativistvoice, committed to the pres-
ervation of local systems of knowledge simply because they are there and they are different.
What he proposes is an alternative set of "universalisms," emerging out of the traditional
knowledges of civilizations such as India, which can team up with what he calls the "other"
West to contest the scientism, rationalism, and technologized universalism that threaten the
lives and livelihoods of many groups in the world. The Intimate Enemy represents one strand
in his larger project, which concerns the battle over selfhood that developed in the colonial
context in India. Foranthropologists, the great significance of this book is that it reminds us that
the "selves" we study in the non-Western world belong to an endangered species.
The Intimate Enemy consists of two long essays, the first on the psychology of colonialism
and the second on what Nandy calls the "uncolonized mind." These essays are preceded by
a preface in which Nandy sets forth his assumptions and objectives. He says that his aim is to
tell the story of the second colonization, the phase of colonialism that "colonizes minds in
addition to bodies" and forces fundamental changes in the cultural prioritiesof the colonized.
He also states his intention to document resistance to this second colonialism, in the form of
concepts and values by which the non-West turns the West into something manageable. In this
resistance, there are very complex alliances between levels of consciousness in both the West
and the non-West:
Ifthereisthe non-Westwhichconstantlyinvitesone to be Westernandto defeattheWeston the strength
of one's acquiredWesternness-thereis the non-West'sconstructionof the Westwhich invitesone to
be trueto the West'sotherself andto the non-Westwhich is in alliancewiththatotherself [p. xiii].
Nandy regardsthe two essays that comprise his book as a tribute to those who refuse to play
the cultural and psychological game by its official rules and "who construct a West which
allows them to live with the alternative West, while resisting the loving embrace of the West's
dominant self" (p. xiv). In Nandy's view, the choices made and positions taken by actors in
colonial India, which looked like collaboration or weak-mindedness, may turn out to be part
of a moral and cognitive venture against oppression.
Nandy's first and more successful essay is "The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age and
Ideology in BritishIndia." This essay builds on the work of Fanon, Mannoni, Cesaire, and other
critics of the psychology of colonialism. But it also offers some subtle new twists. In it he argues
In responding to such a situation, some Indians internalized the terms and discourse of the
aggressor and embraced a vision of modernity that left no room for anything but their learned
image of the West and the West's constructed image of themselves. But others sought to con-
beneath ourselves
If Paul Theroux were to have converted to the semiotics of C. S. Peirce, and then decided to
explore personhood in south India, he might have written a book much like Valentine Daniel's
FluidSigns: Being a Person the Tamil Way. This witty, beautifully written, seductively theoret-
ical book represents an original ethnographic voice in anthropology as it does a new level of
analytic sophistication in South Asian ethnography. Its author is at the forefront of the recent
Peirceian turn, within the semiotic branch of the cultural approach in American anthropology.
This Peirceian turn, which I regard with friendly skepticism, might be yet another effort to
bring back a type of science that has always had an appeal for anthropology-the science of
typology. Whether dividing societies into evolutionary types, races into genetic types, lan-
guages into phonological types, or (in various kinds of cognitive anthropology) pursuing the
proclivities of other societies to typologize and categorize, we have always enjoyed typolog-
izing, perhaps because other kinds of science seemed so hard to practice with ethnographic
material.With Peirce, we have the final Borgesian typology of signs, which answers to two deep
urges in American cultural anthropology in this century: the urge to typologize and the preoc-
cupation with signification.
Happily, in Valentine Daniel's work, there is a playful balance between rich, even riveting
ethnography, and Peirce-made-easy. Everytime the Tamil person threatens to be overwhelmed
by the Tamil Peirceian, Daniel throws in a dose of humor or self-deprecation and returnsthe
reader to what is best about the book, which is Daniel's feeling for the theoretical musings of
some Tamil villagers about person, village, and community and psychobiological equilibrium.
The ethnographic heart of the book is contained in five relatively self-contained essays: the
firston the Tamil conception of the village (ur);the second on the relation between Tamil un-
derstandings of the house and of the person; the third on indigenous theories of sexuality and
reproduction; the fourth on a local ritual of divination involving the use of flowers; the fifth
involving a pilgrimage in which the anthropologist joined a group of fellow villagers, and,
through a kind of ethnographer's epiphany, experienced a very deep confirmation of his own
understandingof the cultural form of semeiosis in Tamil culture.
Daniel states early, and disarmingly, that the architecture of the book, which works slowly
"inwards" to the Tamil conception of the person, is an artifactof presentation. Yet he suggests
that it is not a wholly arbitrarystructure, for there is an indigenous logic in which territory,
house, person, and cosmos interact and constitute each other. Daniel's strategy is to articulate
(ethnographically) a Tamil view of what persons are, and how they work, and then use this
conception for a series of meditations on the Peirceian understanding of signs. It is clear to me
that the Tamil material exemplifies some of Peirce's distinctions very nicely. What is less clear
is the degree to which his Peirceian categories helped him arriveat his analysis of Tamil culture.
Daniel uses Peirce's distinctions between symbol, icon, and index to argue both that symbols
(often talked about rather loosely in previous culture theory) are only one kind of sign and that
Tamil culture seems to revolve crucially around icons and indices ratherthan around symbols.
By extension, the boundary between metaphor and metonym in Tamil culture is subtle and
easily crossed, and Daniel suggests that the Tamil language favors "metonym over metaphor
and synecdoche over metonym" (p. 106). That Daniel is no mechanical typologist of signs is
shown beautifully in the following passage, which precedes his detailed interpretationof the
house (in Tamil culture), as being both "like" a person and, in fact, a person in certain important
regards. Preempting those critics who might accuse him of overliteralizing a set of concepts
beyond hierarchy
Of the three authors who have been discussed, Daniel is the most explicit in his critique of
the preoccupation with caste that has bedeviled South Asian anthropology. But the books by
Nandy and Khare,in their differentapproaches to the politics of the self in South Asia, constitute
significant effortsto go beyond and beneath hierarchy, and its quintessential social expression,
caste-beyond it, by looking for more inclusive principles and processes, of which hierarchy
is only one facet; beneath it, by exploring the phenomenology of the persons who, from time
to time, behave as members of castes. These authors pose critiques of the conceptions of in-
dividualityand ideological harmony on which Dumont's view of hierarchy is founded, but their
shared preoccupation with personhood in South Asia is only one angle from which caste is, at
long last, being deconstructed and reappraised.
Inthe study of South Asian society, the tropological hegemony of hierarchy is being loosened
partlyby explicit critiques and partlyby the multiplication of anthropologies to which I referred
at the beginning of this essay. There are signs of some very radical efforts to reconceptualize
caste as a phenomenological reality and to rethink the salience of the village as a setting for
social life (Schlesinger 1986). Historians, who have long been skeptical of the simplifications
of anthropologists, are making increasingly sophisticated criticisms of the epistemological and
methodological reification of rurallife in much ethnographic work, not least in Dumont (Perlin
1985). There is a burgeoning anthropology of agriculture, in which, for the first time, we are
reminded that South Asian villagers have more to worry about in their daily lives than matters
of caste and ritual, narrowly construed (Harriss 1982; Leaf 1984; Attwood 1984; Mencher
1978). There is an emerging post-Dumontian understanding of the paradoxes of ideological
consensus and orthodoxy in Indic religion (Eisenstadtet al. 1984). The brutal ethnic battles in
Sri Lankaand the Punjab are the subject of work in progress by Valentine Daniel and Veena
Das, work that will provide the basis for a wider anthropology of violence. The topic of gender
has made significant progress recently (Bennett 1983; Sharma 1980). The study of the culture
of modern science has created lively debates, particularlyamong anthropologists based in India
(Uberoi 1978). The cultural formation of emotional life is being analyzed not only from the
point of view of the anthropology of the person but also through the study of intimacy and
etiquette in micro-settings (Egnor 1985; Zwicker 1984). The anthropological study of produc-
tion, commerce, and work has made some important recent strides (Holstrom 1984; Mines
1984), as has the study of the relationship between religion and commerce (Parry1986; Rudner
1986). Finally, there are indications that anthropologists are shifting at least some of their ener-
gies to the study of metropolitan and translocal cultural forms characteristic of contemporary
South Asian society (Appaduraiand Breckenridge 1986).
against holism
The seductiveness of the argument of Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus seems at first glance to
depend on the elegance of its characterization of the ideological foundations of inequality in
caste society. On furtherthought, it appears to enchant the reader by its sharp reflexive analysis
of the preoccupation with equality and the individual in post-EnlightenmentEuropeanthought.
Butthe foundational assumption of Dumont's conception of hierarchy (on which the rest of his
argumentdepends) is a particularview of the relations of partsto what he calls the "whole." It
is not always clear whether Dumont is referringto an ideological, a structural, or an organi-
zational "whole" (perhaps he means each of these some of the time). What is clear is that
hierarchy,for him, is above all a matter of the subordination of parts, that is, the castes, to the
"whole," that is, the system of castes. The implications for rank,for inequality, for stratification
are a contingent application of this principle. Though a great deal more could be said about
the roots and implications of this part-whole conception of hierarchy, for our present purposes
it is necessary only to note the centrality to the entire Dumontian edifice of the idea of a
"whole" that is simultaneously social and ideological. This "whole," which is caste society, is
taken (without examination) to be complete, more important than its parts, stable, and ideo-
logically self-sustaining.
Each of these implications is open to serious question,3 as the emergent anthropologies of
South Asia are increasingly able to show. The work of the authors discussed in this essay, as
well as that of many others (Kemper 1979; Ostor, Fruzetti,and Barnett 1982), suggests that at
least one kind of "part," the South Asian person, may provide the logical and semiotic foun-
dation of the "whole," the caste system, ratherthan vice versa. The other implications of this
conception of the whole are equally suspect. Rather than being ideologically self-contained
and self-sustaining, the principle of hierarchy, seen by Dumont as restingon the Hindu contrast
of pure and impure, may itself be derivative from other philosophies of nature and other prin-
ciples of interaction that transcend or cross-cut caste. The assumption of ideological stability
and unity look equally dubious as we begin to analyze other domains of Indic life such as
agriculture, gender, and metropolitan life, which are characterized by variation, by diversity,
even by fashion.
It is not so much caste that has blinded us to the diversities and indeterminacies of social life
in South Asia, nor is it just the Dumontian conception of hierarchy and the ideological precur-
sors of his view. It is, rather, a particular conception of the coherence, unity, completeness,
stability, and systematicity of caste, articulated most powerfully in Dumont's conception of the
"whole," which has made it difficult to put caste in its place, however important that place
might be. Yet Dumont is not the only one to rely on this idea of the "whole." He represents
only one variant of one of the most cherished slogans of modern anthropology. The sort of
critique of Dumont that is now emerging ought to be one impetus toward a more general re-
vision of the wider anthropological attachment to the idea of the "whole" and to the method
of "holism."
Holism is perhaps the most sacred of all the cows of traditional anthropological theorizing
and description. Like many master concepts of normal science, its continued use depends on
notes
1RonaldIndenhasbeendevelopinga critiqueof Orientalismin Indianstudies(Inden1986a, 1986b [see
followingarticle-Ed.])withwhich I am largelyin sympathy.
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