Category: Race, Tribe, Caste and Class

Lastly, biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood; for man is born with drives toward co-operation, and unless these drives are satisfied, men and nations alike fall ill. Man is born a social being who can reach his fullest development only through interaction with his fellows. The denial at any point of…

In collaboration with Marchia Meeker, Warner developed the Index of Status Characteristics (ISC) to determine the SES of individual families, when the sample size is large and EP cannot be used. The Index is based on two propositions: After carefully examining the correlation between several variables associated with SES, as indicated by EP, these authors finally settled…

Evaluated Participation or EP ‘is posed on the proposition that those who interact in the social system of a community evaluate the participation of those around them, that the place where an individual participates is evaluated, and that the members of the community are explicitly or implicitly aware of the ranking and translate their evaluations of…

So far we have discussed the identifiable groups whose membership is defined by the fact of birth. These are Race, Tribe and Caste. We now move to discuss a social category called Class which is open—through achievement, people can enter a new category. Achievement is used here as a neutral word—a person can achieve success or…

In contemporary politics when political parties talk of vote bank, or of caste dominance, they refer to the electoral constituency—consisting of several settlements—and not to any single village; and quite often they use it for a caste cluster, such as SC votes, Rajput votes, Muslim votes; none of these qualifies as a caste in the…

Village studies carried out by sociologists and social anthropologists in India brought convincing evidence to suggest that ritual hierarchy needs to be differentiated from the social hierarchy of dominance. In the social and political spheres, we are told that the power did not rest with the Brahmans who are regarded as ritually ‘superior’ to others.…

Caste in India is a much misunderstood term. It is employed for different kinds of groupings, not only by the common people, but also by social scientists, including sociologists. It has been, and is being, used to refer to: Sociologically, these are all wrong usages. For example, Brahman is not a Jati, it is a Varna, just as Kshatriya,…

Another ascriptive group, smaller than race and almost similar to ethnic group, and in many ways corresponding to the tribe, is Caste. In most sociology texts, Caste is contrasted with Class as a structural type and is defined in a tautological manner: ‘Class is an open Caste, Caste is a closed Class’. The point underlying…

While race is now recognized as a biological term and the physical indicators for it are well established, there seems to be no consensus regarding the concept of tribe. Pioneering anthropologists carried out their studies of primitive societies without bothering to precisely define the concept of Tribe. This is somewhat understandable if we went back…

The issue of the policies of apartheid of the Government of South Africa remained on the agenda of the United Nations for almost 50 years. After numerous efforts to urge the Government of that country to abandon its policies—declared a crime against humanity—the international campaign reached a watershed in 1989. That year, the United Nations…