Mukkuvar vannimai: Tamil caste and matriclan ideology in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Hence it is true that the ideology in which we see the conscious centre of caste can be lacking here or there within the Indian world, and observation of these cases is of the greatest interest, to show us to what extent and in what conditions institutions of this kind can survive the weakening or disappearance of their ideological aspect. (Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus , 1970: 46) The question of caste ideology, that is, how caste systems are conceived and understood by the people who live their lives within them, is the focus of this essay. It is a tribute to Louis Dumont, and to his determined advocacy of a Hindu ideology of purity and pollution as the superordinate or ‘encompassing’ criterion of Indian caste society, that his work serves today as the standard reference point against which his colleagues in South Asian anthropology feel obliged to measure their own theoretical positions. However, at least one theoretical school now advocates a more radical interpretive framework based upon distinctive South Asian ‘coded bodily substance’ concepts said to be more ideological and culturally authentic than any proposed by Dumont (Marriott and Inden 1974; 1977; Marriott 1976a). While the work of Dumont, on the one hand, and the formulations of Marriott and Inden, on the other, represent the most clearly contrasting interpretations of caste as seen ‘from the inside’, mention will be made of a number of other writers who employ elements of both approaches.

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