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The Poison in the Gift is a detailed ethnography of gift-giving in
a North Indian village that powerfully demonstrates a new
theoretical interpretation of caste. Introducing the concept of
ritual centrality, Raheja shows that the position of the dominant
landholding caste in the village is grounded in a
central-peripheral configuration of castes rather than a
hierarchical ordering. She advances a view of caste as semiotically
constituted of contextually shifting sets of meanings, rather than
one overarching ideological feature. This new understanding
undermines the controversial interpretation advanced by Louis
Dumont in his 1966 book, Homo Hierarchicus, in which he proposed a
disjunction between the ideology of hierarchy based on the purity
of the Brahman priest and the temporal power of the dominant caste
or the king.
In many South Asian oral traditions, herons are viewed as
duplicitous and conniving. These traditions tend also to view women
as fragmented identities, dangerously split between virtue and
virtuosity, between loyalties to their own families and those of
their husbands. In women's songs, however, symbolic herons speak,
telling of alternative moral perspectives shaped by women. The
heron's words--and women's expressive genres more
generally--criticize pervasive North Indian ideologies of gender
and kinship that place women in subordinate positions. By inviting
readers to "listen to the heron's words," the authors convey this
shift in moral perspective and suggest that these spoken truths are
compelling and consequential for the women in North India.
The songs and narratives bear witness to a provocative cultural
dissonance embedded in women's speech. This book reveals the power
of these critical commentaries and the fluid and permeable
boundaries between spoken words and the lives of ordinary village
women.
"The Poison in the Gift" is a detailed ethnography of gift-giving
in a North Indian village that powerfully demonstrates a new
theoretical interpretation of caste. Introducing the concept of
"ritual centrality," Raheja shows that the position of the dominant
landholding caste in the village is grounded in a
central-peripheral configuration of castes rather than a
hierarchical ordering. She advances a view of caste as semiotically
constituted of contextually shifting sets of meanings, rather than
one overarching ideological feature. This new understanding
undermines the controversial interpretation advanced by Louis
Dumont in his 1966 book, "Homo Hierarchicus," in which he proposed
a disjunction between the ideology of hierarchy based on the
"purity" of the Brahman priest and the "temporal power" of the
dominant caste or the king.
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