000			01886nam a2200181Ia 4500
999			_c10074 _d10074
005			20220207214646.0
008			200202s9999 xx 000 0 und d
082			_a305.5609548 Mof.
100			_aMoffatt, Michael.
245		0	_aUntouchable community in south India : _bStructure and consensus
260			_aNew Jersey
260			_bPrinceton
260			_c1979
300			_a322 p.
520			_aThe 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.
650			_aCaste.
942			_cB _2ddc