Caste and other inequities: essays on inequality
- Meerut Folklore Institute 1979
- 325p.
The essays included in this volume cover twenty years' development of the author's research and thought in social inequality and social justice in India and cross-culturally. They issue from the premise that inequality within and among nations is a major social problem. The author holds that institutionalized inequality is a major cause of human anguish and conflict. His own observation and experience in the notorious Alabama, USA brought home to him the invidious working of this social malaise. This collection (of 18 essays including 4 hitherto unpublished) begins with Professor Berreman's well-known, earliest article 'Caste in India and the United States' (1960), proceeds through empirical and theoretical essays on various systems of inequality, rigid and flexible, rural and urban, small scale and large, and concludes with his most recent one, 'Social Equality: A Cross- Cultural Typology' (1978). Several of the essays express the author's interest in rural social organisation in India inere most of his research has been conducted. This is the work of a person for whom social inequality is not a matter of closed-door, academic research but something that touches his deepest convictions. Assembled from widely scattered sources, these essays were a primary basis for award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa to the author by the University of Stockholm in May 1978. An authentic, refreshingly different work that should interest sociologists in India and elsewhere.