Concepts of person : kinship , caste and marriage in India

Concepts of Person is the first comprehensive review of new developments in symbolic, structural, and cultural anthropology applied to a specific area-in this case, India. Using rich ethnographic detail, it looks at the extent to which new models of kinship, caste, and marriage translate into regional and Indian models. The contributors, all distin guished scholars of South Asia, tackle differ ent geographical areas and such diverse topics as hierarchy, forms of address, ritual, house hold, and widowhood. But central to each chapter is a focus on the idea of the person in social relations: when, where, and how is a person a person, and how is this construction related to kinship studies in general? By applying these questions to South Asian

models of the person, this book promises to play a central role in our future understanding of kinship, the possibilities for cross-cultural comparison, and ways of looking at social change.

Ákos Östör is Associate Professor of Anthro pology at Bowdoin College; Lina Fruzzetti is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brown University; and Steve Barnett is Director of Cultural Analysis, Planmetrics, Inc., New York.