Caste and Kinship in Kangra

This study is a major addition to understanding the problems of social inequality and the nature of caste and kinship. A full account is given of the social structure of the region, emphasizing the continuity of principles, which govern relations between castes and relationships within castes.  The ethnographic data bear in particular on: the nature of untouchability; models of caste ranking; the way in which 'traditional' family structures adapt to a diversification of the economy and the debate about the 'instability' of regimes of generalized exchange.  Originally published in 1979.

Politics & Social Sciences

Parry, Jonathan P.

Social Sciences

Routledge

<p>For centuries, the Aghori have been known as the most radical ascetics in India: living naked on the cremation grounds, meditating on corpses, engaging in cannibalism and coprophagy, and consuming intoxicants out of human skulls. In recent years, however, they have shifted their practices from the embrace of ritually polluted substances to the healing of stigmatized diseases. In the process, they have become a large, socially mainstream, and politically powerful organization. Based on extensive fieldwork, this lucidly written book explores the dynamics of pollution, death, and healing in Aghor medicine. Ron Barrett examines a range of Aghor therapies from ritual bathing to modified Ayurveda and biomedicines and clarifies many misconceptions about this little-studied group and its highly unorthodox, powerful ideas about illness and healing.</p>

Aghor Medicine: Pollution, Death, and Healing in Northern India

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Barrett, Ronald L.

Alternative Medicine

University of California Press

As a place to die, to dispose of the physical remains of the deceased and to perform the rites that ensure that the departed attains a "good state" after death, the north Indian city of Banaras attracts pilgrims and mourners from all over the Hindu world. This book is primarily about the priests and other kinds of "sacred specialists" who serve them, about the way in which they organize their business, and about their representations of death and understandings of the rituals over which they preside.

Death in Banaras (Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures)

Religion & Spirituality

Cambridge University Press

<p>As a place to die, to dispose of the physical remains of the deceased and to perform the rites that ensure that the departed attains a "good state" after death, the north Indian city of Banaras attracts pilgrims and mourners from all over the Hindu world. This book is primarily about the priests and other kinds of "sacred specialists" who serve them, about the way in which they organize their business, and about their representations of death and understandings of the rituals over which they preside.</p>

Anthropology

Caste and kinship in Kangra (International library of anthropology)

Routledge & Paul

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