Being Brahmin, Being Modern: Exploring the Lives of Caste Today
Routledge India
ISBN13:
9781138662681
$70.05
There is clearly an academic and political obsession with the 'idea' of the Brahmin. There is also, simultaneously, a near-complete absence of engagement with the Brahmin as an embodied person or community. This book addresses this intriguing paradox by making available a sociological description of the Brahmins in today's Karnataka. It pursues three distinct, yet enmeshed, registers of inquiry - the persona of the 'Brahmin' embodied in the agency of the individual Brahmin; the organised complexes of action such as the caste association and the public culture of print; and finally, taking off from a longer (yet, modern and contemporary) history of non-Brahminical othering of the Brahmin. It argues that we tend to understand the contemporaneity of caste almost exclusively within the twin registers of legitimation-contestation and dominance-resistance. While these facets continue to be salient, there is also a need to push out into hitherto neglected dimensions of caste. The book focuses attention on the many lives of modern caste -- its secularisation, the subject positions that it offers, the equivocations by which persons and communities become 'subjects' of caste, their differential investments in the caste-self.
- | Author: Ramesh Bairy
- | Publisher: Routledge India
- | Publication Date: Jan 21, 2016
- | Number of Pages: 370 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Paperback/Religion
- | ISBN-10: 1138662682
- | ISBN-13: 9781138662681
- Author:
- Ramesh Bairy
- Publisher:
- Routledge India
- Publication Date:
- Jan 21, 2016
- Number of pages:
- 370 pages
- Language:
- English
- Binding:
- Paperback/Religion
- ISBN-10:
- 1138662682
- ISBN-13:
- 9781138662681