Berreman Revisited: Caste and the Comparative Method
Author(s)
Sharma, Ursula
Abstract
In a series of articles and books published in the ’60s and ’70s, Gerald Berreman argued that the institution of caste is not confined to Hindu India. In particular he drew attention to the similarities between caste in India and race in the United States of America, and drew specific attention to the processes by which deference was exacted by high caste/whites and by which untouchables/blacks devised ways of dealing with demands for deference. The dominant trend in the ethnography of caste (and in ‘Indianist’ ethnography in general) is away from comparison, towards a Dumontian emphasis on the sui generis nature of Hindu society. This is in line with a tendency in western anthropology to stress the specific and incommensurable nature of particular cultures. It is argued that despite this fragmenting trend, comparison is nonetheless a useful tool. While we may reject Berreman’s grand schema for classifying different kinds of social inequality as representing a totalising enterprise which anthropologists have rightly discarded, his use of comparison is valuable on two counts: a) it permits sociological generalisation about the micro processes by which domination is both attempted and resisted, b) it acts as valuable rhetorical device (used by ‘modernists’ and ‘post modernists’ alike) through which juxtaposition of the unexpected can surprise the reader into examining the implicit preconceptions and values which they bring to the analysis of other cultures.
