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

by Gloria Goodwin Raheja
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Current price ₹4,311.00
Original price ₹5,174.00
Original price ₹5,174.00
Original price ₹5,174.00
(-17%)
₹4,311.00
Current price ₹4,311.00

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Book cover type: Paperback
  • ISBN13: 9780226707297
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: University of Chicago Press
  • Publisher Imprint: University of Chicago Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 300
  • Original Price: USD 37.0
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 386 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Anthropology / Cultural & Social

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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