Untouchable community in south India : Structure and consensus

The present work is about Untouchables in the village of "Endavur," south India. It is intended as an ethnography, as a reasonably comprehensive description of the social and cultural context of "being an Untouchable" in a rural south Indian setting. But it is also intended as an argument, set in a structuralist mold. Briefly, the argument and the struc turalism are as follows.

To be an Untouchable in a rural Indian caste system is to be very low in, and partially excluded from, an elaborately hierarchical social order. The consequences of this lowness and partial exclusion, however, are not those argued in much of the anthropological literature on Untouchability and caste. Untouchables do not necessarily possess distinctively dif ferent social and cultural forms as a result of their position in the system. They do not possess a separate subculture. They are not detached or alienated from the "rationaliza tions" of the system. Untouchables possess and act upon a thickly textured culture whose fundamental definitions and values are identical to those of more global Indian village culture. The "view from the bottom" is based on the same principles and evaluations as the "view from the middle" or the "view from the top." The cultural system of Indian Un touchables does not distinctively question or revalue the dominant social order. Rather, it continuously recreates among Untouchables a microcosm of the larger system.