Review: [Untitled]

Reviewed Work(s):
Way of Life: King, Householder, Renouncer; Essays in Honour of Louis Dumont by T. N.
Madan
Steve Barnett

American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 86, No. 1. (Mar., 1984), pp. 210-211.

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210 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
descri~tionof the social formation and the rela-
tions of production in the two villages in the
middle of the 20th century, but it is difficult to
relate these to the specifics of the economic ar-
cheology connected with the Marxian, or a
modified-Marxian, model of the Asiatic mode
of production. As such, one has to make what
one can of the theoretical insights as they stand
on their own; they hardly seem to follow from,
or illuminate, the concrete village surveys.
My last comment relates to the familiar issue
of caste and class: in what ways does caste help
or hinder ~oliticalmobilization on class lines?
Thanjavur is a particularly interesting labora-
tory for a study of this question because land
ownership, especially in its eastern part, is
highly skewed with a high proportion of the
agricultural work force consisting of agricul-
tural labor, of whom again the scheduled castes
form a very high proportion. We could have
had a most useful contribution if Gough had
been able to explore in 1950-80-a period in
which changes in the forces of production have
led to sizable o u t ~ u tincreases-the extent to
which political activity has (or has not) been
able to promote, or profit from, the weakening
of caste and the strengthening of class con-
sciousness. It is therefore regrettable that the
author has not been able to publish her re-
surveys of 1976 along with her original surveys
in a single volume.
Way of Life: King, Householder, Renouncer;
Essays in Honour of Louis Dumont. T . N.
Madan, ed. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing
House, 1982. 434 pp. n.p. (cloth).
Steve Barnett
Planmetrics, Inc., New York
This book commemorates Louis Dumont's
seventieth birthday in 1981 through a collection
of essays supposedly linked by following through
Dumont's notion of the "good life" as defined
Brahmanically. As in most edited volumes of
this sort, the various authors are quite free in
the manner in which they actually tie their
papers to Dumont's ideas. Tenuous links not-
withstanding, this is an important book for an-
thropologists of India because of the quality of
most papers and because of the central motifs in
recent Indian anthropological theory addressed
by many authors.
I focus this review on those papers of direct
[86, 19841
interest to anthropologists of India. F. A.
Marglin has written a compelling study of tem-
ple Devadasis in Pun, Orissa. She sees structural
similarities between King and Brahman, and
wife and husband. Marglin develops a complex
analysis of actual temple ritual, textual allu-
sions, and symbolic oppositions to explore the
meaning of Devadasi identity as both dangerous
and auspicious. She offers the important con-
trast, auspicious/inauspicious,as a complement
to purity/impurity, and suggests that this
situates Devadasi identity and provides the form
of Devadasi link to hierarchy. Dumont's separa-
tion, and encompassment, of kingly power from
Brahmanical status is importantly underscored
by Marglin.
Madan continues to report on his long and
highly productive research among the Kashmiri
Pandits. This paper is an instance of a larger
tendency in contemporary Indian anthropology
to locate some of Dumont's basic insights in L 2
everyday life as it is lived by ordinary caste
members, and to focus on the cultural construc-
tion of caste, family, and person as reflected in
life cycle events such as marriage, birth, and
death. Madan's clearly presented paper com-
plements similar efforts in other parts of India.
Recently and curiously however, Dumont has
rejected some of these attempts to ground
abstract hypotheses in concrete data, so
Madan's excellent summary raises complex
issues in the anthropology
- .
of India that are not
directly discussed in this volume.
T. Selwin tackles a difficult subject, the rela-
tion of dharma to adharma, in a central Indian
village in Madhya Pradesh. He provides in-
teresting data on villagers' attitudes to the more
unorthodox Gonds, concepts of sickness and
death, and conceptualizations of three festivals
centering a r o u n d ~ o l i Selwin
. sees adhama as
a necessary corollary to dharma and raises sug-
gestive conjectures about the relation of Holi to
the festivals of Nava-ratri and Rama-navrni.
R. Nicholas continues his preoccupation with
concepts of the body as organizing symbols, and
here extends his research to shradda concep-
tions and observances in Bengal, although he
claims all-India significance for many of his
concepts. J. P. Parry has produced a mundane
piece on Hindu theological concepts of
Varanasi, both as a sacred place and as a special
location where death provides automatic
"liberation" from rebirth. Parry discusses some
implications and contradictions implicit in such
liberation, but does not reach any compelling
conclusions and does not cite Dumont.
 CULTURALIETHNOLOGY
A strange paper by D. Pocock, a descriptive
account of the occupational range within a
small Brahman caste in Saurashtra, focuses on
occupational change away from attendance on
pilgrims at the sacred complex of Dvaraka.
Pocock discusses alternate occupations to pil-
grim attendance in great detail, and, unfortu-
nately, I agree with his own characterization of
this laundry list as "a rather dull catalog" (p.
334). He uses this occupational variation to leap
to vast conclusions about the relevance of caste
for understanding Indian life and the relative
significance of artha and dharma. In an arcane
way, these conjectures are counter-Dumont, but
the data are too local, and Pocock never directly
joins the argument.
A. Mayer has written an amusing piece about
a perky despot, the Maharaja of Kolhapur.
While it is interesting to see the Maharaja's
specific blending of British and Indian styles
and ideology, Mayer cannot, despite a forced
attempt, tie the Maharaja's view to Dumont's
theories.
In addition to these directly anthropological
papers, this volume includes important Indolog-
ical studies of interest to anthropologists. "The
Salvation of the King in the Mahabharata" by
M. Biardeau is a major piece offering essential
insights into t h a t text. She brilliantly
foregrounds the kingly position of Arjuna (as
Krishna's true bhakta) versus more traditional
interpretations stressing Yudhisthira. C.
~ a l a m o u d offers a powerful reading of
Purusartha that points up the consistency of a
stable hierarchv of values over time. R. Inden
discusses relations among early medieval Indian
kings to argue that a consistent hierarchy of
levels of kings emerges. Much of his supportive
data come from a temple and court complex for
a "king of kings," and its builder, in Gujarat.
S. Tambiah extends Dumont's emphasis on
the position of the renouncer to early Buddhist
and Jain monastic orders, focusing on dif-
ferences between Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain
concepts of renunciation, and on the Hindu
ability to include and fit new components in the
hierarchy.
Other articles include a reading of the Ar-
thasastra (K. J. Shah), an analysis of the story of
Rama (V. Das), the theory of Brahmacarya (R.
Gandhi), an important analysis of householder
and wanderer (J. C. Heesterman), and a
description of householder and renouncer in
Brahmanical Hinduism and in Buddhism (R.
Thapar).
The most disappointing part of this volume is
21 1
the two introductory pieces by J-C. Galey. The
first paper purports to outline Dumont's major
positions; unfortunately, it uses an inap-
propriate metaphor, Dumont's characterization
of himself as an "artisan," to delineate
Dumont's intellectual development. T h e
metaphor obscures Dumont's actual relation to
the development of Indian thought and Du-
mont's own relations with his colleagues. Galey
tries to do too much with Dumont's concepts,
making them over into a basic guide for
understanding Western values in general, and
so falls into banalities about totalitarianism in
general (p. 9). Galey's interview with Dumont
suffers from a similar problem: he does not ask
critical or probing questions, and thus the
reason for an interview format is lost. While Du-
mont's interview ruminations are informative,
Galey loses a chance to discuss important
theoretical problems with Dumont.
Madan ends the volume with an essay, "For a
Sociology of India," that situates Dumont's work
in the development of Indian studies and finds
more links in the various papers to one or
another of Dumont's positions than does this
reviewer.
Sohar: Culture and Society i n a n Omani
Town. Fredrzk Barth. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1983. vii + 264 pp.
$24.50 (cloth).
Sidney R. Waldron
State University of New York, Cortland
Sohar is a major extension of Fredrik Barth's
generative theory of behavior and society to a
complex urban milieu. Sohar is a Muslim town
of some ten thousand in Oman, on the eastern
coast of the Arabian peninsula. As a trading
and transshipment center, its roots are ancient,
deriving from the monsoon routes that con-
nected it to eastern Africa on one side and the
Persian Gulf and India on the other.
As those who are familiar with Barth's work,
and who have read the recent critical evalua-
tions of it in Paine's and Prattis's recent review
articles ( M a n 1983; AA 1983) might expect,
Sohar is as much an analytic exercise as it is an
ethnography. Parts 1 and 2, approximately the
first third of the book, are basically descriptive
of the community and its pluralistic attributes.
Part 3 delves into the enaction of individual
behavior in the context of households, net-
works, and the marketplace, while shifting to a