000			01466nam a22001937a 4500
008			240806b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a226707288(pbk.)
082			_a323.2 _bRAH
100			_aRaheja, Gloria Goodwin _91226
245			_aThe poison in the gift: _britual, prestation, and the dominant caste in a north indian village
260			_aLondon _bUniversity of Chicago press _c1988
300			_axiv,286p.
500			_ahttps://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3637608.html
520			_aThe Poison in the Gift is a detailed ethnography of gift-giving in a North Indian village that powerfully demonstrates a new theoretical interpretation of caste. Introducing the concept of ritual centrality, Raheja shows that the position of the dominant landholding caste in the village is grounded in a central-peripheral configuration of castes rather than a hierarchical ordering. She advances a view of caste as semiotically constituted of contextually shifting sets of meanings, rather than one overarching ideological feature. This new understanding undermines the controversial interpretation advanced by Louis Dumont in his 1966 book, Homo Hierarchicus, in which he proposed a disjunction between the ideology of hierarchy based on the “purity” of the Brahman priest and the “temporal power” of the dominant caste or the king.
650			_aRituals _911331
650			_aCaste system _911246
650			_aIndia _9456
942			_cG
999			_c10706 _d10706