Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village

The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village

Raheja, Gloria Goodwin

Paperback

Anthropology

ISBN10: 0226707296
ISBN13: 9780226707297
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Sep 15 1988
Pages: 300
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.64 Width: 6.15 Depth: 9.03
Language: English
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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