South Indian subcaste : social organization and religion of the Pramalai Kallar / translated by M. Moffatt and A. Morton ; edited by Michael Moffatt

A South Indian Subcaste, first published in French in 1957, is here rendered in English for the first time. It is one of the most comprehensive ethnographic descriptions available of an Indian caste, and indeed of village life, in South India. The Pramalai Kallar are described in great detail, working culturally from the outside to the inside-from matters that can be analysed without reference to local Indian ideology (locality, technology, agriculture, economy) to matters in which the people's own categories are central (social organization and religion).

The fieldwork reported here (and in a complementary comparative study of kinship in the area, now in Affinity as a Value, Chicago, 1982) was intended as a first step in the application of social anthropology to the study of Indian society and culture. Therefore the analysis aims at abstracting structural patterns likely to be general in the region and even beyond it.

LOUIS DUMONT is Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His works on India represent one of the first and most notable contributions of social anthropology to the understanding of a complex society and one of the great civilizations of history. For the last twenty years he has been working, in a reversed perspective, on a comparative study of the Western modern system of ideas and values (From Mandeville to Marx, Chicago, 1977; Essays on Individualism, Chicago, in press). Professor Dumont holds honorary doctorates of the Universities of Chicago and Lausanne. He is a Foreign Member of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.