Village India : Studies in the little community

Contents: The Social System of a Mysore Village by M N Srinvas; The Social Structure of a Tanjore Village by E Kathleen Gough; The Changing Status of a Depressed Caste based on reports by Bernard S Cohn; Interplay Among Factors of Change in a Mysore Village by Alan R Beals; Notes on an Approach to a Study of Personality Formation in a Hindu Village in Gujarat by Gitel P Steed; Peasant Culture in India and Mexico: A Comparative Analysis by Oscar Lewis; Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization by McKim Marriott; The World and the World View of the Kota by David Mandelbaum. Eight villages in seven different linguistic areas and five provinces of India are here illuminated by detailed analyses of caste, community structure, personality, religion, world view and the current forces of social change. AS component units within a complex, ancient and today newly important civilization, Indian villages offer a challenging field for study of peasant culture and society. This is the first book to bring together authoritative studies of a number of Indian villages, each examined in depth by up-to-date techniques. Proceeding from ideas suggested by Robert Redfield in his recent The Little Community, the eight social anthropologists who made these studies attempt to evaluate methods of understanding such small communities as wholes. Based on extensive and expert field work, the papers in this volume show how the Indian village tends to overflow the forms of thought that have been applied to it. In each of the villages described, qualifying or opposing its integrity as a homogeneous and distinctive cultural unit, there appear extra-village factors - pilgrimages to sacred shrines; cast and kin ties; economic, political and administrative institutions; and proximity to towns, highways and railroads. George McClelland Foster, Jr born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on October 9, 1913, died on May 18, 2006, at his home in the hills above the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as a professor from 1953 to his retirement in 1979, when he became professor emeritus. His contributions to anthropological theory and practice still challenge us; in more than 300 publications, his writings encompass a wide diversity of topics, including acculturation, long-term fieldwork, peasant economies, pottery making, public health, social structure, symbolic systems, technological change, theories of illness and wellness, humoral medicine in Latin America, and worldview.