1 00:00:00,040 --> 00:00:24,050 No minute. Right. I'm going to send you. OK. 2 00:00:24,050 --> 00:00:33,390 OK. Well, they. Welcome to everyone to the first modern South Asian Studies seminar of the new academic year at Oxford. 3 00:00:33,390 --> 00:00:38,760 My name is Danica Munther and I'm associate professor and anthropology of South Asia here at Oxford. 4 00:00:38,760 --> 00:00:46,530 I'm going to be in conversation with my colleague, Professor Paul Yohanan, who is professor in Indian history and culture at Oxford. 5 00:00:46,530 --> 00:00:50,790 As you all know, the topic of the session is global histories of hierarchy. 6 00:00:50,790 --> 00:00:56,130 Reflections from India on Cost Race and the Black Lives Matter movement. 7 00:00:56,130 --> 00:01:04,410 I'm good. I just see a a sort of short introduction, just a few words on the thinking behind the seminar team. 8 00:01:04,410 --> 00:01:11,520 So it's been an extraordinary year for the world. And we're beginning this new session and welcoming new students and colleagues under 9 00:01:11,520 --> 00:01:16,930 rather difficult circumstances not to take recourse to an English understatement. 10 00:01:16,930 --> 00:01:21,570 The pandemic and the differentiated suffering it has caused along lines of race, caste, 11 00:01:21,570 --> 00:01:29,310 gender and class is an important reminder of the sealants of these identities and how lethal they quite literally can be. 12 00:01:29,310 --> 00:01:35,460 At the same time, the death of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement globally has opened a new, 13 00:01:35,460 --> 00:01:39,690 certain political and intellectual questions. We, as scholars of India, 14 00:01:39,690 --> 00:01:43,530 are trained in the social sciences and humanities propose considering them through 15 00:01:43,530 --> 00:01:48,120 a situation of the literature of this longstanding literature on inequality, 16 00:01:48,120 --> 00:01:52,890 on caste, on hierarchy, on violence from from this region. 17 00:01:52,890 --> 00:01:55,920 Now, an immediate provocation for this conversation. 18 00:01:55,920 --> 00:02:06,150 And what will sort of take as a jumping off point is, of course, the publication of the book cost by Pulitzer prise winning author Isabel Wilkerson. 19 00:02:06,150 --> 00:02:08,700 It is, of course, Black History Month here in the UK. 20 00:02:08,700 --> 00:02:15,210 And we see this conversation today as part of our attempt to mark its significance in the spirit of this 21 00:02:15,210 --> 00:02:21,600 discussion that hopes to situate the correspondences between race and cost while a perspective from India. 22 00:02:21,600 --> 00:02:28,290 It is incumbent upon me to also mention what happened in hot-air us in the North Indian state of what the police recently. 23 00:02:28,290 --> 00:02:35,070 I know most of you are well aware of this incident, but it bears recounting here at the very outset all the same. 24 00:02:35,070 --> 00:02:42,600 A young Dalit woman, Maneesha, while Miki was brutally raped and murdered by a group of upper caste tackled men in her village before dying, 25 00:02:42,600 --> 00:02:44,220 she testified to the gang rape. 26 00:02:44,220 --> 00:02:51,330 Yet another testimony of the intersection of cost and gender, as well as the prevalence of Gosta atrocities in contemporary India. 27 00:02:51,330 --> 00:02:55,530 Again, as is well known by now, many shows family was not given a corpse to commit, 28 00:02:55,530 --> 00:03:02,280 but rather the police forcibly burnt a body against a family's explicit wishes under the cover of darkness. 29 00:03:02,280 --> 00:03:07,830 Disturbingly, there've been several attempts by the government and bar to downplay the feud and cover up the repeat rape 30 00:03:07,830 --> 00:03:13,680 and murder attesting to the prevalence of institutionalised caste ism in the very aboutus of the state. 31 00:03:13,680 --> 00:03:21,060 Now, this horrific incident has led to a spate of protests in India and beyond with the slogan of Dalit lives matter. 32 00:03:21,060 --> 00:03:24,390 If this conversation between all of us assembled here is one of considering 33 00:03:24,390 --> 00:03:28,800 correspondences between race and cost as entrenched structures of inequality. 34 00:03:28,800 --> 00:03:35,610 Wilens that question then what is being described as the hot rusada brings a swarm of the starkest way possible. 35 00:03:35,610 --> 00:03:40,800 At the same time, the mimicking of the language and visuals of political mobilisation around Black 36 00:03:40,800 --> 00:03:45,780 Lives Matter and Dalit Lives Matter opens out larger questions for the Academy, 37 00:03:45,780 --> 00:03:51,600 such as How do our longstanding research interests respond to these particular Mormans in time? 38 00:03:51,600 --> 00:03:58,890 What can the stretch do to John? Cost and inequality from India contribute to our thinking of race and inequality more globally. 39 00:03:58,890 --> 00:04:04,440 What forms of solidarities? Political, institutional, social. Does this push us to strive for? 40 00:04:04,440 --> 00:04:12,660 And how might that teaching our thinking. Writing citation or practises disciplinary orientations and public engagement be transformed 41 00:04:12,660 --> 00:04:19,080 through an engagement with and by a centring of Black Lives Matter as well as Dalit lives matter? 42 00:04:19,080 --> 00:04:24,210 Not before I had a word to Professor O'Hanlan, who's gonna get us started on thinking historically about the relation between 43 00:04:24,210 --> 00:04:28,530 race and cost and who's also going to offer a reading of Wilkerson's book. 44 00:04:28,530 --> 00:04:36,210 Just a few housekeeping announcements. So first of what, I'd like to thank our colleague in Lubanga, who's associate professor of Hindi at Oxford, 45 00:04:36,210 --> 00:04:38,850 as well as the course director of the modern South Asian Studies, 46 00:04:38,850 --> 00:04:45,060 degrees for taking a lead on organising all the seminars for this entire year over year olds. 47 00:04:45,060 --> 00:04:50,010 Extremely grateful to Claire Soldo from the Asian Studies Centre at St. Anthony's College. 48 00:04:50,010 --> 00:04:53,700 And Stephen, my name from the Oxford School of Global Nerea Studies, 49 00:04:53,700 --> 00:04:59,060 who've been sort of heroically managing the logistics and the technology behind the series. 50 00:04:59,060 --> 00:05:03,240 Just on the question, technology. As you can see, we are recording this conversation. 51 00:05:03,240 --> 00:05:10,800 We researched this very much as a dialogic event. You know, we're so delighted that all of you were able to join us in this fourth session. 52 00:05:10,800 --> 00:05:18,360 We're, of course, constrained by technology and by time. But we do hope to make this as much of a conversation as as possible as you can see. 53 00:05:18,360 --> 00:05:23,160 There is a Q&A box on the site which is open for comments, questions. 54 00:05:23,160 --> 00:05:26,580 Peace talks. Anything you basically wish. 55 00:05:26,580 --> 00:05:34,240 Polly and I briefly offer out some tentative ideas and then we look forward to get your thoughts in the latter half of the session. 56 00:05:34,240 --> 00:05:39,960 Due to constraints of time, we might not be able to read out or respond to everyone, but we'll try our absolute best. 57 00:05:39,960 --> 00:05:51,000 So please bear with us. Okay. So just over to Pollino. 58 00:05:51,000 --> 00:05:56,370 Polymathic is still muted. Thank you very much, Ninotchka. 59 00:05:56,370 --> 00:06:06,360 And it's a great pleasure to be able to have you have this much broader conversation than we're able to do at the start of the academic year. 60 00:06:06,360 --> 00:06:12,810 Zoome teams become so much a part of our lives. 61 00:06:12,810 --> 00:06:20,760 So there's not, Ekert indicated. One of the occasions for this conversation is Isabel Wilkerson's important new book, 62 00:06:20,760 --> 00:06:28,500 Cost The Origins of Our Discontents, published in the USA in August. 63 00:06:28,500 --> 00:06:32,070 Let me offer here a brief outline. 64 00:06:32,070 --> 00:06:43,260 It's a book principally about race and racial antagonisms in the USA, in which Wilkerson suggests that entrenched racial divides in the USA, 65 00:06:43,260 --> 00:06:52,210 which are currently such a pressing issue across the world, are in fact better understood as a form of cost. 66 00:06:52,210 --> 00:07:02,620 Wilkinson takes her definition of cost principally from the Indian experience as a form of social hierarchy represented as an emanating from divine, 67 00:07:02,620 --> 00:07:08,500 well understood to be inherited from one generation to the next, 68 00:07:08,500 --> 00:07:14,110 which enforces heredity in occupations, restriction of marriage, relations within the cost, 69 00:07:14,110 --> 00:07:23,320 community norms around notions of purity and pollution, dehumanisation and stigma attached to costs. 70 00:07:23,320 --> 00:07:31,810 At the bottom of the hierarchy, the enforcement of caste discipline through fear and violence and an intellectual 71 00:07:31,810 --> 00:07:39,260 superiority ascribed to those we would call them Brahmins at the apex of the system. 72 00:07:39,260 --> 00:07:50,300 Wilkerson argues that cost in this form is actually a universal feature of social organisation presence over millennia in India, 73 00:07:50,300 --> 00:07:58,400 emerging again in the slave societies of the USA and their later inheritance in modern day racial divides 74 00:07:58,400 --> 00:08:07,320 visible also in European fascism and the Holocaust that it brought about in the middle of the 20th century. 75 00:08:07,320 --> 00:08:17,800 Now, Wilkerson doesn't suggest that there's always a kind of direct transmission of ideas and institutions between these manifestations. 76 00:08:17,800 --> 00:08:26,350 She does say that there are sometimes connexions, as in the officials dispatched from Germany to the USA in the 1930s, 77 00:08:26,350 --> 00:08:37,510 to look for racially based models of social segregation that might be applied to Jews and other stigmatised communities in Germany. 78 00:08:37,510 --> 00:08:48,340 Rather, Wilkerson suggests that the tendency to think and act in ways that privilege some and stigmatise others is actually innate. 79 00:08:48,340 --> 00:08:55,140 What she calls, quote, the human pyramid encrypted into us all. 80 00:08:55,140 --> 00:09:03,060 Race has been one important modern and particularly entrenched manifestation of this tendency, 81 00:09:03,060 --> 00:09:09,500 but it's only a manifestation of a deeper and innate human drive. 82 00:09:09,500 --> 00:09:17,000 In describing this very appropriately, Wilkison takes up the analogy of the human body itself. 83 00:09:17,000 --> 00:09:23,210 Race is malleable in changing one type of skin, as it were, 84 00:09:23,210 --> 00:09:31,940 that lines over what she depicts as the hard skeleton of cast beneath cast as the enduring propensity 85 00:09:31,940 --> 00:09:42,480 of humans to create and enforce structures of esteem and stigma wherever they find themselves. 86 00:09:42,480 --> 00:09:51,390 So there's much to think about here, not just for scholars of race in the USA, but for students of South Asian societies, 87 00:09:51,390 --> 00:10:02,910 where a key social institutions such as caste is just generalised as the underlying paradigm for all human inequality. 88 00:10:02,910 --> 00:10:06,810 There is an obvious question for anthropologist's. 89 00:10:06,810 --> 00:10:17,590 In the elements of structural funk's functionalism that Wilkinson has clearly taken on from the social anthropologists of the 1940s and 50s, 90 00:10:17,590 --> 00:10:25,520 who also saw caste forms of caste in the segregation of the American South. 91 00:10:25,520 --> 00:10:33,570 But in deploying this argument, in the changed circumstances of our own times where the black lives matter across the world, 92 00:10:33,570 --> 00:10:42,530 the movement across the world has pushed questions of rate race so powerfully to the forefront of the political conversation. 93 00:10:42,530 --> 00:10:54,950 The argument also offers a compelling new perspective. As Wilkerson suggests, it offers us a fresh way of seeing race at a time when the terms, 94 00:10:54,950 --> 00:11:01,460 race and racism have lost almost all of their real analytical value. 95 00:11:01,460 --> 00:11:09,590 Rather, as she points out, they've become morally charged terms of reprimand and shame, 96 00:11:09,590 --> 00:11:20,330 allowing those who disagree on the principles of racism that perpetuate its practises to avoid challenge and confrontation. 97 00:11:20,330 --> 00:11:28,540 It's useful, I think certainly was very useful for me to remind ourselves of the long history of conversation and parallel analysis, 98 00:11:28,540 --> 00:11:35,000 these between African-American scholars and activists and their counterparts in India 99 00:11:35,000 --> 00:11:41,510 and other parts of South Asia campaigning for low cost and done it communities. 100 00:11:41,510 --> 00:11:51,320 Taking me back to my long ago PHC research Maharastra as Jyoti Rao, fully writing shortly after the American Civil War, 101 00:11:51,320 --> 00:11:57,890 called his research into low cost and Dalit conditions good Ungarie slavery. 102 00:11:57,890 --> 00:12:05,060 And he dedicated to what he called the good people of the US for their struggles against slavery. 103 00:12:05,060 --> 00:12:10,640 There's the less direct conversation, but certainly parallel concerns. 104 00:12:10,640 --> 00:12:15,820 Again, this is very familiar ground between Dr Ambedkar and his contemporary. 105 00:12:15,820 --> 00:12:26,600 The US civil rights activist Professor W.E. B. Du Bois and Budka used some of his time in Columbia between 1913 and 16, 106 00:12:26,600 --> 00:12:33,080 taking courses in social anthropology, where he was particularly influenced by Franz Boas, 107 00:12:33,080 --> 00:12:42,590 who rejected contemporary understandings of race as innate difference and instead emphasised race as a cultural and social construct. 108 00:12:42,590 --> 00:12:51,740 From this and Badcoe develops his understanding of untouchability not as a form of race, but rather a social and cultural difference. 109 00:12:51,740 --> 00:13:00,560 But difference presenting a much greater resistance to change than slavery because laws could emancipate the slave, he argued. 110 00:13:00,560 --> 00:13:08,750 Whereas untouchability was a consequence of religious obligation and so much more difficult to remove deploy. 111 00:13:08,750 --> 00:13:16,060 On the other hand, the analytic of cost a combination of social and bodily ranking. 112 00:13:16,060 --> 00:13:23,920 Played a central role in his understanding of social and political life in the Jim Crow era of reconstruction, 113 00:13:23,920 --> 00:13:34,280 which he described as a racialized form of cost. It became very common to invoke the idea of caste in the context of the American South. 114 00:13:34,280 --> 00:13:41,770 The anthropologist Allison Davis in 1941 used it gonna model and used it in 1944. 115 00:13:41,770 --> 00:13:49,030 Talking of the race based caste system of post reconstruction, the USA, 116 00:13:49,030 --> 00:13:55,330 other Connexions and conversations are so well known as I mentioned them only briefly. 117 00:13:55,330 --> 00:14:02,500 The Dalit welcome extended to Martin Luther King during his brief visit to India in 1959. 118 00:14:02,500 --> 00:14:13,090 The US Black Panther movement of the 1980s, which provided much inspiration for India's Dalit panther movement of the early 1970s and after. 119 00:14:13,090 --> 00:14:21,010 And of course, there have been a whole host of much more recent and rich conversations, which I can't begin to do justice to here. 120 00:14:21,010 --> 00:14:32,740 With the growth of Dalit studies in US universities and the many small institutional initiatives aimed at bringing Dalit scholars to the US. 121 00:14:32,740 --> 00:14:37,780 So Wilkerson is really the latest in a long line of scholars and activists who 122 00:14:37,780 --> 00:14:44,560 have found the perspective of cast a refreshing new analytic in other contexts. 123 00:14:44,560 --> 00:14:48,400 There are criticisms, of course, as you would expect, 124 00:14:48,400 --> 00:14:56,640 Wilkerson's book gives a graphic and harrowing account of slavery and its long aftermath in the USA. 125 00:14:56,640 --> 00:15:01,180 Its account. But it lives, though, is much more abbreviated. 126 00:15:01,180 --> 00:15:08,140 And there is the question itself of a centralisation of caste in her wider argument. 127 00:15:08,140 --> 00:15:14,890 Nonetheless, there is undoubtedly enormous value in the opening up of these intellectual and political connexions, 128 00:15:14,890 --> 00:15:27,240 or are renewing them with the opportunities that they bring in these times of acute pressure for communities marginalised by race, caste and class. 129 00:15:27,240 --> 00:15:34,050 One thing I think the book does draw attention to is the comparing the compelling 130 00:15:34,050 --> 00:15:42,830 parallels between cost and race as different but congruent forms of hierarchy. 131 00:15:42,830 --> 00:15:49,850 In the US setting following Wilkerson, the attempt to espersen subsume race into caste. 132 00:15:49,850 --> 00:15:55,520 Only when we think of racial stigma and marginality as a form of caste. 133 00:15:55,520 --> 00:16:00,970 Can we really comprehend its entrenched and all pervasive culture. 134 00:16:00,970 --> 00:16:06,580 But in South Asia and amongst starlet's active in international arenas, 135 00:16:06,580 --> 00:16:16,780 it has sometimes seemed more strategic to argue that cost and cost is at cost ism should actually be recognised as a form of racism. 136 00:16:16,780 --> 00:16:25,600 During the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, held under the US's auspices of the UN dunnart, 137 00:16:25,600 --> 00:16:33,460 representatives campaigned very hard to get cost recognised as a manifestation of racism. 138 00:16:33,460 --> 00:16:42,130 They failed in the face of objections from the government of India, who insisted that the roots of racism actually lie outside India. 139 00:16:42,130 --> 00:16:50,350 In the bio politics of the West, with its inheritances of slavery and colonialism in the UK, more recently, 140 00:16:50,350 --> 00:16:58,570 Dalit activists fought long and hard to get cost recognised as a category of discrimination like race. 141 00:16:58,570 --> 00:17:03,400 Under the UK's Equalities Act of 19 of 2010. 142 00:17:03,400 --> 00:17:09,340 But again, they failed as opponents described the move as anti Hindu. 143 00:17:09,340 --> 00:17:14,700 The dull It Lives Matter movement again seeks implicitly at least, 144 00:17:14,700 --> 00:17:20,490 to connect cost to race and to demand that the international attention given to the 145 00:17:20,490 --> 00:17:26,110 Black Lives Matter movement should have its equivalent for adults across South Asia, 146 00:17:26,110 --> 00:17:32,520 whose circumstances are equally, if not sometimes even more challenging. 147 00:17:32,520 --> 00:17:37,050 At the same time, one can't help but wonder how far this, as it were, 148 00:17:37,050 --> 00:17:49,080 internationalisation of cost is actually helpful for the cause of Dalit and other marginal communities across the states and societies of South Asia. 149 00:17:49,080 --> 00:17:57,270 On the one hand, it might have been a strategic gain to have it recognised that cost and cooperates elements 150 00:17:57,270 --> 00:18:05,850 of discriminatory social practise that might be categorised elsewhere as modes of racism. 151 00:18:05,850 --> 00:18:13,890 On the other hand, to have cost so generalised as to be the default form of all human discrimination 152 00:18:13,890 --> 00:18:18,060 might be viewed from a conservative perspective as a very welcome move. 153 00:18:18,060 --> 00:18:24,590 It alleviates the sense that caste might be a South Asian problem in particular. 154 00:18:24,590 --> 00:18:25,700 Indirectly, 155 00:18:25,700 --> 00:18:39,080 it also reinforces the argument that is now often made that caste identities these days belong primarily to the sphere of the private of culture. 156 00:18:39,080 --> 00:18:48,350 If there was a bad type of cost that belongs to every part of the world as hierarchy and stigmatisation, perhaps they can also be within South Asia. 157 00:18:48,350 --> 00:18:56,260 Cost is a very different thing. The homes cost of private identity and family social practise. 158 00:18:56,260 --> 00:19:07,780 So perhaps in the end, Wilkerson's book does do us an additional service when it places cost and race in such direct conversation. 159 00:19:07,780 --> 00:19:16,540 It makes us ask again what cost really is not only a social practise which pervades the public as well as the private sphere, 160 00:19:16,540 --> 00:19:26,540 but what cost is as a term in public discourse, caste ism like racism, is a morally charged term of reproach. 161 00:19:26,540 --> 00:19:34,010 But the simple term cost can be just an everyday descriptor or for those who prefer to avoid it, 162 00:19:34,010 --> 00:19:41,170 the meaning that lies behind the more anodyne term community. 163 00:19:41,170 --> 00:19:47,520 In these senses, it seems perhaps to an outsider like myself here in Oxford. 164 00:19:47,520 --> 00:19:52,570 Very much shielded from the difficult challenges that I alluded to here. 165 00:19:52,570 --> 00:20:00,920 That the perspective's opens up here offer huge opportunities, the chance to expand vital conversations. 166 00:20:00,920 --> 00:20:07,580 But I also wonder and seek to learn from the reflections of colleagues who are actually closer, 167 00:20:07,580 --> 00:20:16,690 much closer to these harsh choices, even as it seems to offer new possibilities of alliance. 168 00:20:16,690 --> 00:20:27,710 As this internationalisation of cost not also suggest new ways in which it may seem once again presented to us as rooted in nature, 169 00:20:27,710 --> 00:20:37,700 but this time through the idiom of global scholarship. So that's some very general and naive thoughts from me. 170 00:20:37,700 --> 00:20:41,390 And let me hand over now to Nine Eker, who will pick up. 171 00:20:41,390 --> 00:20:51,200 I think some of these things, Nonaka. Thank you, Polly, for the Stoodley brilliant and very elegant reading of Nickerson's book. 172 00:20:51,200 --> 00:20:55,910 I just remind everyone who's here that there's the Q&A box here on the site. 173 00:20:55,910 --> 00:21:02,440 So if you have any questions from or any comments or thoughts on what Polly has just said or you know, 174 00:21:02,440 --> 00:21:07,060 or on this topic in general, please start adding them now. 175 00:21:07,060 --> 00:21:14,810 What I'm going to do really quickly is so one of the things that we envisage this as was a conversation between a historian and an 176 00:21:14,810 --> 00:21:24,190 anthropologist to think about the different ways in which disciplines have have looked at the relationship between recent cost in India. 177 00:21:24,190 --> 00:21:28,820 Police have closed down this incredibly elegant and beautiful reading of it, which isn't just rooted in history. 178 00:21:28,820 --> 00:21:31,700 It's, you know, it's sort of a multidisciplinary reading of it. 179 00:21:31,700 --> 00:21:38,660 What I'm going to do before we sort of look back to some of the very important points that Polly just made, 180 00:21:38,660 --> 00:21:47,190 I just want to run us through very quickly the sort of the history or sort of the ways in which the sociology and dance quality of India. 181 00:21:47,190 --> 00:21:53,180 I have looked at this relationship between recent cost. Before we come on to Wilkerson's book. 182 00:21:53,180 --> 00:21:57,020 And, you know, well, I was sort of reading this and thinking a bit more about this. 183 00:21:57,020 --> 00:22:03,170 I was really fascinated by the changes in the ways in which anthropology, in sociology. 184 00:22:03,170 --> 00:22:07,490 Have studied cost, but particularly in relation to race. 185 00:22:07,490 --> 00:22:14,900 Now, what you can see when you look at this question of cost injuries from India is that actually in the 1940s, 186 00:22:14,900 --> 00:22:19,430 it was the American sociologist like Allison Davis and the Gardiners, as Polly mentioned, 187 00:22:19,430 --> 00:22:23,120 as well as people like John Dollard and Hortense Buttermaker, 188 00:22:23,120 --> 00:22:32,960 who were looking at doing this deep ethnographic studies of what they call cost in the segregated South in the 1930s in America. 189 00:22:32,960 --> 00:22:40,430 Now, the way in which they used costs at the time was very much in conjunction with class, but was also, 190 00:22:40,430 --> 00:22:47,810 as Chris Fuller has argued, it was also used in a way to stay away from the blacks closer race. 191 00:22:47,810 --> 00:22:52,670 But again, what Fuller has argued and what they have contributed, the Indian soldiers have also argued, 192 00:22:52,670 --> 00:22:58,850 is that actually there was this woman in the 30s and 40s where costs became quite central to the ways in which Americans, 193 00:22:58,850 --> 00:23:02,450 astrologists and anthropologists were studying what he would call race, 194 00:23:02,450 --> 00:23:07,160 or there was fighting segregation or inequality and hierarchy in the United States. 195 00:23:07,160 --> 00:23:09,560 But somehow, by the end of the 40s, 196 00:23:09,560 --> 00:23:16,370 it never sort of didn't catch onto the conceptual aboutus within the disciplines of anthropology and sociology and the whole 197 00:23:16,370 --> 00:23:26,480 utility of the term cost to understand hierarchy or discrimination or race in the U.S. sort of faded out after the 1940s in India. 198 00:23:26,480 --> 00:23:35,690 On the other hand, there was probably one of the earliest mentions amongst anthropologists of the relationship between cost and race was a nineteen 199 00:23:35,690 --> 00:23:43,220 or eight by riskily who argued that the caste system originated needed from the encounter of race is really problematic. 200 00:23:43,220 --> 00:23:50,900 And yet all evolutionary perspective on it, which was sort of discarded for the Indians, was what good it to digital into it in many ways. 201 00:23:50,900 --> 00:23:53,500 In his work in the 60s and 70s. 202 00:23:53,500 --> 00:24:01,670 But sort of the really interesting point in Indian sociology, anthropology, when the discussion of race becomes quite, you know, 203 00:24:01,670 --> 00:24:08,180 takes on sort of more meat sort of sea was a 1960s when General Betterment and Louis do more independently 204 00:24:08,180 --> 00:24:14,330 published articles expressing very different opinions on the relationship between cost and race. 205 00:24:14,330 --> 00:24:19,820 So if a better man who it's worth noting was drawing from his experience of living in Alabama, 206 00:24:19,820 --> 00:24:23,820 as well as of doing fieldwork in that other one in northern India, 207 00:24:23,820 --> 00:24:30,390 the to what he called the two car systems of the United States and India are truly similar. 208 00:24:30,390 --> 00:24:35,600 And for him, the similarity between what he described as the core systems of the U.S. and India, 209 00:24:35,600 --> 00:24:45,140 what we think of as race and cost was that the both of them, the fundamental feature board, is, quote, institutionalised inequality. 210 00:24:45,140 --> 00:24:52,140 Now at about the same time, do more and we do more was the great French sociologist who wrote this on. 211 00:24:52,140 --> 00:24:56,890 This big book called Homo Hierarchical, which is very forcefully shaped the field of Indian sociology, 212 00:24:56,890 --> 00:25:01,750 announced apology, particularly when it comes to a study of cost, sort of completely rejected this. 213 00:25:01,750 --> 00:25:10,720 And he wrote this piece in an appendix to the book Homo Hydrocrackers, where he said that actually this is a gross misunderstanding. 214 00:25:10,720 --> 00:25:19,840 To say that what we call cost in India is the same as what we call race in America is profoundly wrong. 215 00:25:19,840 --> 00:25:28,810 And the reason that he sort of thought this is wrong is, as honourable there has noted, is because for do more cost was normal in India. 216 00:25:28,810 --> 00:25:35,110 And again, these are his terms. Cost was considered sort of intrinsic feature of India and it was normal, 217 00:25:35,110 --> 00:25:40,820 whereas according to do more, this is what he considered pathological in America. 218 00:25:40,820 --> 00:25:49,330 And so what Chris Fuller and other, they have separately noted that the overwhelming effect of the influence of Du Moore's book, Halmahera Arcus, 219 00:25:49,330 --> 00:25:57,250 was that it led to an abandonment of this comparison between cost and race in India within indents, astrology and anthropology. 220 00:25:57,250 --> 00:26:01,720 Now, it's sort of interesting to see that, you know, again, 221 00:26:01,720 --> 00:26:07,450 this is a slight tangent to this conversation, but I think at some levels it does fit into it. 222 00:26:07,450 --> 00:26:13,120 And the point here is that actually it was a very forceful account by a leading sociologist at one 223 00:26:13,120 --> 00:26:19,640 point who rejects this relationship between recent costs that led to to its sort of abandonment, 224 00:26:19,640 --> 00:26:23,290 sort of see within that biography of intense astrology. 225 00:26:23,290 --> 00:26:29,440 And this is despite the fact that homo hierarchical and Deewar have been criticised extensively, ad nauseum. 226 00:26:29,440 --> 00:26:33,100 What would see. But it sort of still sticks on that. 227 00:26:33,100 --> 00:26:37,240 This is not something this kind of comparison is not necessarily relevant. 228 00:26:37,240 --> 00:26:43,720 This is, of course, changing in the contemporary moment. And I'm going to come to that in a bit. But before I do that, I should say that, you know, 229 00:26:43,720 --> 00:26:53,380 the next time you sort of see this race cost comparison popping up is a 1990 where Andre Beta begins his essay on jeanius cost and gender by saying, 230 00:26:53,380 --> 00:26:54,850 and I'm quoting him, 231 00:26:54,850 --> 00:27:02,860 Any attempt today to bring together race and cost for comparison and contrast is likely to meet with a cold reception, end of quote. 232 00:27:02,860 --> 00:27:10,900 Now, he himself went on to argue that the inequalities of cost are illuminated in the same way as those of race through a concentration of gender. 233 00:27:10,900 --> 00:27:16,240 And but that he basically looked at two things. He looked at what he called the sexual use and abuse of women. 234 00:27:16,240 --> 00:27:21,850 And secondly, this unremitting concern with the purity of women at the top of the cost of that is hierarchy. 235 00:27:21,850 --> 00:27:27,420 This wasn't really an argument he developed fully at the time. And somehow sort of again, it sort of petered out. 236 00:27:27,420 --> 00:27:35,980 You know, I think something that I want to sort of offer here in in light of the discussions that have been opened up by Wilkerson's book, 237 00:27:35,980 --> 00:27:44,020 but also actually given sort of the stark similarities between Black Lives Matter and that it lives matter as well as something new, sociology. 238 00:27:44,020 --> 00:27:47,560 Brown's apology, if indeed that's coming up right now. 239 00:27:47,560 --> 00:27:53,410 I think this also is actually a moment for us to think about the politics of knowledge production 240 00:27:53,410 --> 00:27:58,060 and in what ways is it that certain categories are not considered productive and others are? 241 00:27:58,060 --> 00:28:03,430 What are the ways in which we decide, as well as just anthropologists, to pursue the study of cost? 242 00:28:03,430 --> 00:28:07,360 Now, it's we sort of know that much of the sociology and anthropology of India has been 243 00:28:07,360 --> 00:28:11,980 written either by Upper-Class scholars or by white academics who tended to not 244 00:28:11,980 --> 00:28:16,660 see caste and the writings or what is much more commonplace is that they have 245 00:28:16,660 --> 00:28:23,180 located within certain marked out domains only where somehow caste becomes visible. 246 00:28:23,180 --> 00:28:29,440 This this idea of costs becoming invisible is something that's been that's being sort of demeans. 247 00:28:29,440 --> 00:28:30,460 And Richard is invisible. 248 00:28:30,460 --> 00:28:37,540 It's something that has been radically challenged and disrupted by Dalit writers and some very important recent ethnographies, of course. 249 00:28:37,540 --> 00:28:40,930 But the point is that I'm going to discuss this orthography is in a minute. 250 00:28:40,930 --> 00:28:47,230 But I think the point I want to make here is that we cannot underplay the Haeju many of the scholarship of the 251 00:28:47,230 --> 00:28:54,970 sort of long sort of weight of scholarship that has written outcaste from certain spaces or certain domains. 252 00:28:54,970 --> 00:29:03,250 Now, I am taking my lead on this argument from David Morses recent article in modern Asian Studies on the Modernity of Cost. 253 00:29:03,250 --> 00:29:12,070 Where he makes a very, very compelling argument about how the study of cost has been corralled, sort of see into certain spheres. 254 00:29:12,070 --> 00:29:17,080 I'm actually just going to quote him. Yeah. So he says this article, quote, 255 00:29:17,080 --> 00:29:26,650 argues that the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public policy enclosure of cost in the non modern realm of religion and caste politics, 256 00:29:26,650 --> 00:29:34,240 while aligning modernity to cost, erasing market economy, caste processes, enclosure's and evasions that both globalisation, 257 00:29:34,240 --> 00:29:41,290 India suggest the need to rethink the modernity of cost beyond Orientalists and post-colonial frameworks. 258 00:29:41,290 --> 00:29:42,460 And of course, 259 00:29:42,460 --> 00:29:50,170 now I think what he's sort of what most does very powerfully in this work is that he shows how caste is very much central to the posterization India, 260 00:29:50,170 --> 00:29:51,990 how it's very much part of the market. 261 00:29:51,990 --> 00:30:01,630 Asked functions functions as a form of resource, Howcast is able to exclude people who had materially disadvantages gullets, for instance. 262 00:30:01,630 --> 00:30:04,820 And I think what he also does really powerfully in this work and which is what's coming out from 263 00:30:04,820 --> 00:30:09,980 some of the new sort of some of this fantastic new literature which is engaging directly with 264 00:30:09,980 --> 00:30:16,040 cost and race is really this idea of how there has been a long sort of history of sociology and 265 00:30:16,040 --> 00:30:22,170 anthropology where you start to notice and see cost only in certain domains and not in others. 266 00:30:22,170 --> 00:30:26,090 Right. Such as the domain of politics, such as the domain of exactly as Polly said, 267 00:30:26,090 --> 00:30:31,820 in the private sphere or within something like marriage rather than in spaces like the market economy, 268 00:30:31,820 --> 00:30:36,230 where you somehow think the forces of modernity have overtaken it. 269 00:30:36,230 --> 00:30:39,830 Now, I'm going to quickly what I'm going to do in the next sort of four, 270 00:30:39,830 --> 00:30:46,610 five minutes is I'm going to just think about I'm going to just need some of the people who are working on this, 271 00:30:46,610 --> 00:30:53,840 as well as point outs on the trends I could see emerging in the sociology and anthropology of India, which I personally find very intriguing. 272 00:30:53,840 --> 00:31:01,850 And I think that have a fascinating take on the race course relation that might nuance some of the questions emerging from Wilkerson's book. 273 00:31:01,850 --> 00:31:05,750 Now, of course, of a prominent amongst this is on the question of race and cost. 274 00:31:05,750 --> 00:31:12,100 Is the writing of sort of Genndy, who has written this book, which became an instant bestseller. 275 00:31:12,100 --> 00:31:19,580 Cost Matters. He's also credited with on until probably a book on Ambedkar Sooraj Yang. 276 00:31:19,580 --> 00:31:25,940 They wrote a cover story for Caravan magazine just earlier this year in July, which was entitled Race Cost. 277 00:31:25,940 --> 00:31:34,820 And what will it take to make that it lives matter? He is working quite extensively on what he's termed the ballot black question. 278 00:31:34,820 --> 00:31:43,100 Similarly, we have agendas and Romanians recent book, The Cost of Merit, which has shown how the language of merit in engineering schools in India. 279 00:31:43,100 --> 00:31:48,500 She's talking about tomography in 80 Madras and the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. 280 00:31:48,500 --> 00:31:53,540 How sort of this language embedded invisible Lazes costs privilege in India. 281 00:31:53,540 --> 00:31:57,470 And she also notes that this is a similar to the United States where, you know, 282 00:31:57,470 --> 00:32:03,530 those Americans were least disadvantaged by racism, are most likely to endorse the country as post-racial. 283 00:32:03,530 --> 00:32:08,360 And this is very similar to those Indians who have benefited anomalous enormously from 284 00:32:08,360 --> 00:32:16,610 Zappacosta creation and who refuse to see caste or declared themselves cost less in some way. 285 00:32:16,610 --> 00:32:24,600 Of course, there's some really fantastic work on classlessness that's coming out by astrologist in India, such as official responded, 286 00:32:24,600 --> 00:32:28,580 who've talked about how classlessness becomes something that is, you know, 287 00:32:28,580 --> 00:32:34,670 a sort of that operates in particular ways in different domains within India. 288 00:32:34,670 --> 00:32:45,330 And in that sense, also has I haven't myself seen this relationship between the post-racial society or, you know, not seeing Greece being need here. 289 00:32:45,330 --> 00:32:50,450 But it has a lot of echoes with precisely those arguments. 290 00:32:50,450 --> 00:32:56,060 We also have geographers, urban geographers, historical geographers who started working on racialisation in India. 291 00:32:56,060 --> 00:33:02,060 So there was an anti board work workshop last year and week thinking difference in India that studied the links, as I described, 292 00:33:02,060 --> 00:33:12,140 between myriad forms of social difference, which included caste, tribe, ethnicity, faith and broader understandings of race, racism and racialisation. 293 00:33:12,140 --> 00:33:17,480 So I'm not going to make this into a laundry list of people who are studying the race relation. 294 00:33:17,480 --> 00:33:25,580 But I just wanted to flag that as something that is is emerging from this work in India, which is really promising and exciting. 295 00:33:25,580 --> 00:33:32,690 And again, I want to end by not offering an exhaustive list of where perhaps we can see this discussion and discourse going forward. 296 00:33:32,690 --> 00:33:40,070 But I'm good to just offer out some thoughts on how we can perhaps discuss it further in our conversation right now. 297 00:33:40,070 --> 00:33:49,700 So one of the ways in which I think race and cost can be really productively studied together intellectually is actually in 298 00:33:49,700 --> 00:33:56,150 the context of the climate crisis and the ecological ecological collapse that you're not at all sort of standing in the face. 299 00:33:56,150 --> 00:34:06,140 So one of the most exciting ways in which we can see the ecological collapse being theorised and studied is to it's linked to racial capitalism. 300 00:34:06,140 --> 00:34:11,420 And the question is, can we see similar developments or work on the climate crisis in South Asia, 301 00:34:11,420 --> 00:34:15,920 which makes these links between empire cost and capitalism more clearly? 302 00:34:15,920 --> 00:34:23,600 So there is somebody who was working on this in this field is my lead on the Nocturne, who's also based in the US, 303 00:34:23,600 --> 00:34:30,410 who's worked on environmental justice in America, as well as the relationship between colonial history and contemporary struggles at on cost, 304 00:34:30,410 --> 00:34:36,530 identity and environmental outcomes in urban India and other sort of field where you 305 00:34:36,530 --> 00:34:40,580 can see this relationship between cost and reduce really coming out quite strongly. 306 00:34:40,580 --> 00:34:45,020 It's more graphically is in our work on the Indian diaspora. 307 00:34:45,020 --> 00:34:51,610 So if Indians will sort of settled outside India, but somehow caste, you don't sort of lose it when you know. 308 00:34:51,610 --> 00:34:59,030 What are the shores of any go beyond the nation state, so to say they're being base striking cases of cost azem, 309 00:34:59,030 --> 00:35:03,380 such as, for instance, in companies in Silicon Valley, begin. 310 00:35:03,380 --> 00:35:06,590 Polly has already mentioned the intense lobbying that went on in the UK to 311 00:35:06,590 --> 00:35:11,480 prevent cost discrimination from being listed in the UK equalities legislation. 312 00:35:11,480 --> 00:35:17,780 But again, you can constantly see costs coming up in the UK when it comes to legislations and insurers 313 00:35:17,780 --> 00:35:24,170 and work on forced marriages and honour killings in the UK and the cost basis of this. 314 00:35:24,170 --> 00:35:29,190 There are another sort of strand which probably needs to be developed a bit more, 315 00:35:29,190 --> 00:35:36,110 but we can again see some really interesting ethnographic work coming out is on looking at institutions of the state. 316 00:35:36,110 --> 00:35:41,450 So there is a very robust literature on what he calls structural racism or institutional racism, 317 00:35:41,450 --> 00:35:46,160 which has been written by black feminist writers, which has been written by black authors. 318 00:35:46,160 --> 00:35:50,870 And what we can see emerging out of India is the sort of awareness, 319 00:35:50,870 --> 00:35:54,980 and that's biological and sociological literature on things like institutional Gosta Surman, 320 00:35:54,980 --> 00:36:02,690 structural cost ism and how the built into, for instance, the police or upper or upper echelons of the bureaucracy. 321 00:36:02,690 --> 00:36:08,930 But again, these are things that we are still sort of working through that there is there are some 322 00:36:08,930 --> 00:36:14,930 a few really good ethnographies that look at the cost dimension of the state itself. 323 00:36:14,930 --> 00:36:20,040 One of the ways in which I personally found my own understanding of especially that it's 324 00:36:20,040 --> 00:36:25,430 got to shift more spitefully enhanced is by reading the memoirs of Dalit scholars, 325 00:36:25,430 --> 00:36:29,420 especially of women, Dalit scholars. So I'm thinking heard of Yasuoka. 326 00:36:29,420 --> 00:36:39,260 That's very powerful book coming out as valid as well as such other good laws and amongst elephants, again, incredibly powerful. 327 00:36:39,260 --> 00:36:44,980 Yes, but that also has an excellent review of Isabel Wilkerson's book in Foreign Policy, 328 00:36:44,980 --> 00:36:53,990 where she really makes the point that in some ways it's quite similar to what was on what was running through Polly's argument. 329 00:36:53,990 --> 00:37:00,080 But that really see is that what Wilkison is doing is that she's really serving a uniquely American argument. 330 00:37:00,080 --> 00:37:05,990 And what is very powerful about Wilkerson's book is that the Indian state has been doing all this diplomatic 331 00:37:05,990 --> 00:37:11,810 manual work to keep cost and the notorious ness of cost and cost atrocities out of a global lie. 332 00:37:11,810 --> 00:37:16,370 But what Wilkison is able to do is she sort of reveals it. But at the same time, 333 00:37:16,370 --> 00:37:23,390 due to this problem with the centralisation of cost and not looking at contemporary Dalit struggles in India to 334 00:37:23,390 --> 00:37:31,970 sort of unfortunately invisible eyes is sort of the kind of marginalisation of contemporary India of Coston, 335 00:37:31,970 --> 00:37:41,530 again, up completely. I'm sure without intention. But she somehow plays into those arguments of which are made up into the India that 336 00:37:41,530 --> 00:37:46,580 cost is this archaic institution that will somehow whether it'll be on its own. 337 00:37:46,580 --> 00:37:51,620 And finally, I sort of have to end with this because, again, this is sort of my personal research interests. 338 00:37:51,620 --> 00:37:55,790 The places where I can see cost literature on cost coming out very powerfully 339 00:37:55,790 --> 00:38:00,050 is within multi species demography when it comes to looking at the non-human. 340 00:38:00,050 --> 00:38:06,740 This is particularly true when you look at the politics around beef or on food politics and on bovine politics, 341 00:38:06,740 --> 00:38:15,680 where some of them new sort of modest pieces of graphic work really brings out the salience and the bar and the violence of cost in very, 342 00:38:15,680 --> 00:38:19,860 very profound ways. So I'm going to sort of end here. 343 00:38:19,860 --> 00:38:28,010 And this as I said, this is just some preliminary thoughts. We'd love to sort of get questions from the rest of you. 344 00:38:28,010 --> 00:38:31,880 I can see that the quite a few out there already. 345 00:38:31,880 --> 00:38:40,460 I should have said, by the way, that you have the option when you put up your questions to either make them anonymous or to put your name to it. 346 00:38:40,460 --> 00:38:44,120 If I see your name, I'm gonna just read that out. 347 00:38:44,120 --> 00:38:54,370 So I hope that's OK. I can see the quite a few anonymous questions up there, so I think we'll start taking them at this point. 348 00:38:54,370 --> 00:38:58,610 Polly, do you have any that you would like to take first? 349 00:38:58,610 --> 00:39:05,380 Well, I wonder if we might start with this direct question that we have at the top from Cuomo. 350 00:39:05,380 --> 00:39:16,850 Yeah. Why do you have moments like Hutz Ross haven't haven't attracted global condemnation that the killing of George Floyd did in the United States. 351 00:39:16,850 --> 00:39:23,780 I mean, in some senses, within that simple question I posed, as it were, 352 00:39:23,780 --> 00:39:31,610 the question that the questions that you and I have found ourselves trying to ask. 353 00:39:31,610 --> 00:39:36,430 And of course, it in some ways, 354 00:39:36,430 --> 00:39:45,770 it it points to differences in the forms of solidarity amongst African-American communities in the United 355 00:39:45,770 --> 00:39:55,160 States and the more limited forms of solidarity amongst the smaller and weaker dollar communities in India. 356 00:39:55,160 --> 00:39:57,770 I mean, one can think of a whole host of answers. 357 00:39:57,770 --> 00:40:11,340 And one what one hopes is that conversations that Wilkerson's book, the Congos Wilkerson's book, have enabled will will help, too. 358 00:40:11,340 --> 00:40:26,570 It will help amongst Stull IT movements to develop and emulate and learn from campaigns in the United States to try to draw that kind of attention. 359 00:40:26,570 --> 00:40:38,090 Just listening to you, Ninotchka, I just wanted to throw in one final idea about why it is that and that for some people, 360 00:40:38,090 --> 00:40:43,790 caste and race seem important parallels, and for others they seem to have very little to do with one another. 361 00:40:43,790 --> 00:40:51,140 And obviously part of the answer to that is political. And I wondered whether having read Wilkerson's book, whether, 362 00:40:51,140 --> 00:40:59,570 in fact it might help us to see much more in common than we normally do between 363 00:40:59,570 --> 00:41:04,460 the forms of marginalisation and stigmatisation that are there in race and cost, 364 00:41:04,460 --> 00:41:16,060 in both which these forms are based very much in social practise and in in understandings of the body, those things on one hand. 365 00:41:16,060 --> 00:41:26,100 But the differences, on the other hand, between the utility and the Solidarity's that we see in cost and that we see in race. 366 00:41:26,100 --> 00:41:34,670 And I think those in the utility of race and its Solidarity's and the utility of costs for those who for whom caste 367 00:41:34,670 --> 00:41:42,410 communities are a critical safety net to our sphere of sociability are an opportunity for political alliance, 368 00:41:42,410 --> 00:41:51,320 an opportunity to press the state, the Indian state for access to reservations and other social benefits. 369 00:41:51,320 --> 00:41:57,890 So I'm if a direction for scholarly research doesn't lie in trying to separate 370 00:41:57,890 --> 00:42:03,820 out those two and which would make the parent comparisons easier to explore, 371 00:42:03,820 --> 00:42:11,510 but in a way which doesn't isn't interrupted by people pointing out that there 372 00:42:11,510 --> 00:42:18,500 will actually race and cost is so very different than these other ways anyway. 373 00:42:18,500 --> 00:42:24,470 Now, that's a great common, Bolly, in terms of I mean, if you're thinking also of sort of the political utility of this, 374 00:42:24,470 --> 00:42:30,080 that is a way in which one can sort of get bogged down in certain aspects of the comparison rather 375 00:42:30,080 --> 00:42:35,690 than thinking about the ways in which can be marshalled for more progressive political positions. 376 00:42:35,690 --> 00:42:40,610 I completely agree. Should we take this question about Scheel? 377 00:42:40,610 --> 00:42:44,450 I think it's an important one where I think he's saying that. 378 00:42:44,450 --> 00:42:50,690 So I just read it out in our investigation of cost. Can religion really be ignored for being a private cultural sphere? 379 00:42:50,690 --> 00:42:58,490 Is religion really a private thing in India? To say that we more want to see caste discrimination in the modern space market economy, etc, 380 00:42:58,490 --> 00:43:02,960 might ignore the critical question of confronting the religious foundations of caste in India? 381 00:43:02,960 --> 00:43:07,220 This is, after all, an important difference between recent caste Gosta sanctified by Hinduism. 382 00:43:07,220 --> 00:43:11,240 So if I could just quickly your part. Yes, I completely agree. 383 00:43:11,240 --> 00:43:17,240 I mean, I don't think anyone would say that religion is just a private thing in India, especially in the end, everything right now. 384 00:43:17,240 --> 00:43:20,210 I think it's absolutely impossible to see that. 385 00:43:20,210 --> 00:43:28,230 I think what I was making the point about seeing caste in the in the market, which is basically to come from David, was his argument, 386 00:43:28,230 --> 00:43:33,050 what he is trying to say or what there is that there are certain spaces where cost is not considered, 387 00:43:33,050 --> 00:43:39,680 which are thought to be doing a B with cost, are supposed to be able to challenge caste in certain ways. 388 00:43:39,680 --> 00:43:42,830 And what he's argued through is ethnographic work as well as through these 389 00:43:42,830 --> 00:43:47,360 quantitative studies is that actually Goss' is being is very active within it. 390 00:43:47,360 --> 00:43:53,240 So the point that was just to say that we see caste. This is where it does a normally. 391 00:43:53,240 --> 00:43:58,770 Study draw, other than to say that it isn't there. And in other areas, such as the private or the culture. 392 00:43:58,770 --> 00:44:02,710 And you are absolutely right that religion absolutely needs to be at the centre of this. 393 00:44:02,710 --> 00:44:06,240 Polly, did you have any thoughts on Bart's question? Well, 394 00:44:06,240 --> 00:44:12,840 I suppose I suppose what I'd want to point to that I thought wasn't covered in wasn't 395 00:44:12,840 --> 00:44:17,700 very seriously looked at in Wilkerson's book because and that's kind of understandable. 396 00:44:17,700 --> 00:44:25,240 Is the link between cost and religion in the very powerful drive still? 397 00:44:25,240 --> 00:44:33,150 We're still in it towards cost and Ogami. And not just cost and dominate, but high Pogany. 398 00:44:33,150 --> 00:44:42,090 The idea that the idea that women should always marry socially equals or should marry upwards. 399 00:44:42,090 --> 00:44:55,940 And as we know, those ideas about Teich high pergament off Hindu ideas in the book in the broad sense of that term, 400 00:44:55,940 --> 00:45:01,860 in that within, as it were, Hindu social theory, 401 00:45:01,860 --> 00:45:07,430 when a man and a woman marry the woman takes on the man's identity, as Munu puts it, 402 00:45:07,430 --> 00:45:11,800 and no one would say they tend to ism is simply money, but money does put it. 403 00:45:11,800 --> 00:45:17,610 When a man and a woman marry, the woman merges into the man's identity just as the river. 404 00:45:17,610 --> 00:45:22,440 When the river reaches the ocean, it takes on, it merges with the ocean. 405 00:45:22,440 --> 00:45:27,120 So a marriage that is based on Hypponen. 406 00:45:27,120 --> 00:45:35,430 He works for everybody because the woman takes on the identity of the man. 407 00:45:35,430 --> 00:45:42,390 And so the woman's family, as it were, is is at least unchanged in its social status. 408 00:45:42,390 --> 00:45:50,580 And if a woman marries a man is superior status, the woman's whole family is lifted up by that connexion. 409 00:45:50,580 --> 00:45:58,770 If a woman marries, as it were, against the grain, pretty low in a case of hypovolemic, 410 00:45:58,770 --> 00:46:05,520 everybody loses because the woman's family loses status because she has marriage, as it were, beneath her. 411 00:46:05,520 --> 00:46:12,540 The man's family doesn't gain because the woman's identity is dissolved and that of the man. 412 00:46:12,540 --> 00:46:19,260 And and these are understandings of the relationship between the masculine and the feminine, 413 00:46:19,260 --> 00:46:27,060 which are which are that they are there in many religions, but they are certainly there in Hindu social thought. 414 00:46:27,060 --> 00:46:33,750 And so it's for that reason, of course. And this is a familiar thing for anthropologists to say. 415 00:46:33,750 --> 00:46:45,760 For that reason, marriage strategies are such an important part of a family's envisaging of its of its own social strategy moving forward. 416 00:46:45,760 --> 00:46:50,910 You know, what kinds of marriage connexion can we make? 417 00:46:50,910 --> 00:46:54,950 Decisions about marriage? Certainly. 418 00:46:54,950 --> 00:47:03,260 Until very recently and for most people, made as a matter of family strategy rather than as it whereas in the simplest of individual choice. 419 00:47:03,260 --> 00:47:07,090 So so I think it's a very long answer to Pastor Sheila's question. 420 00:47:07,090 --> 00:47:16,050 But but you know that that is one of the links, as it were, between caste and Hindu religion, that what one can think of very many others. 421 00:47:16,050 --> 00:47:23,580 But I have an interest in gender. And so the aspect of of and dogor me not just and dogma, 422 00:47:23,580 --> 00:47:38,080 but type Bergomi seems to be a very important and quite specific element in in in in in in in Hindu social thought and social practise. 423 00:47:38,080 --> 00:47:46,830 Should critics out there could be. Veev question next, who says do you think the treatment of caste Andres and other fields like political 424 00:47:46,830 --> 00:47:51,300 science and international relations have been adequate as an IRS scholar, 425 00:47:51,300 --> 00:47:56,870 feel that the disciplines that aren't speaking to each other and would like to lay out thoughts. 426 00:47:56,870 --> 00:48:02,790 So if I could say that I don't know the I ah feel that well, 427 00:48:02,790 --> 00:48:08,370 but I think that is a really interesting difference in the way in which different disciplines study cost. 428 00:48:08,370 --> 00:48:16,140 So Bulleit, I do this lecture on costs together in which we look at, say, how history and anthropology, the literature and know has studied cost. 429 00:48:16,140 --> 00:48:22,800 And it's very interesting to see the slight differences that inflexions the ways in which the debates have gone, etc. 430 00:48:22,800 --> 00:48:27,640 My sense is that I out in particular doesn't be that much attention to cost. 431 00:48:27,640 --> 00:48:31,560 And I wonder but that that might have something to do with the arguments that certain 432 00:48:31,560 --> 00:48:36,090 people like such of the Subramanium we've been making about cost or about the idea 433 00:48:36,090 --> 00:48:41,490 that sort of the fact that actually institutions of the state have not been studied 434 00:48:41,490 --> 00:48:46,650 through a sort of a cost or agenda length as adequate quickly as they might have. 435 00:48:46,650 --> 00:48:53,120 So speaking as someone who works on the state and India, I can see that it's kind of shocking how. 436 00:48:53,120 --> 00:49:02,850 Little help in that it showed cost and the state is actually and that might have something to do with the kindness of it in the feed of our Polly. 437 00:49:02,850 --> 00:49:09,890 I don't know if you have any ideas on this. I think you said I'm not an eye or specialist at all. 438 00:49:09,890 --> 00:49:16,200 So I think, you know, I think you've said. 439 00:49:16,200 --> 00:49:22,210 I would have sent an organiser. So. Let's move on to another question. 440 00:49:22,210 --> 00:49:28,150 Absolutely. There's a question by a pool. 441 00:49:28,150 --> 00:49:36,640 My life might be who ask on the quick undercuts a Berryman's comparison as a whole to say, 442 00:49:36,640 --> 00:49:41,710 I do not agree with how he created a completely new definition of cost as a hierarchy of dogmas, 443 00:49:41,710 --> 00:49:44,770 divisions, and which membership has had a degree and permanent. 444 00:49:44,770 --> 00:49:50,890 He does pound point out the similarities between the two societies in terms of institutionalised inequality. 445 00:49:50,890 --> 00:49:58,240 The rules of avoidance between cost or typing. Punishment for defined sexual gains and rationalisation of cost status. 446 00:49:58,240 --> 00:50:03,970 But he disregards the fundamental influence of culture and also colonialism. 447 00:50:03,970 --> 00:50:09,870 His article felt superficial to me as he tries to haphazardly fit his research into his own new conceptions. 448 00:50:09,870 --> 00:50:12,040 He doublets from the mean objective. 449 00:50:12,040 --> 00:50:19,150 Yeah, I mean, I have to say, someone who works in around that are doing and who sort of done a biography in the family as well. 450 00:50:19,150 --> 00:50:25,630 I also don't agree with Berryman's conception as a whole. I found it. 451 00:50:25,630 --> 00:50:30,520 You know, I found it. In fact, I would agree with many of your criticisms. 452 00:50:30,520 --> 00:50:38,620 I also think your point about the ways in which colonialism I am biased, completely written on the Mogra fee is quite problematic. 453 00:50:38,620 --> 00:50:47,170 But I again brought him up in this discussion only because he is the one anthropologist, last sociologist who did a counter to do more. 454 00:50:47,170 --> 00:50:51,550 And we got into a bit of a debate here, do more. I think he made a good number. 455 00:50:51,550 --> 00:50:58,920 Dalva at a workshop together would do more. And they got into this argument on the risk cost question. 456 00:50:58,920 --> 00:51:03,730 And I think he is seeing something kind of interesting, though, which actually links up to some of the other questions that you're getting here, 457 00:51:03,730 --> 00:51:09,310 which is on, you know, what are the ways in which we can think about cost azem and racism together? 458 00:51:09,310 --> 00:51:17,690 And if we follow, what Betterment is seeing is he would argue that they're actually based similar. 459 00:51:17,690 --> 00:51:28,200 I don't have anything to say on Bettmann. I think what what comes to me from many of the questions that we're getting. 460 00:51:28,200 --> 00:51:30,130 It's kind of implicit in them. 461 00:51:30,130 --> 00:51:43,540 And I'd like to just to draw out is what the consequences are for our understanding of cost and indeed for cost as a social institution. 462 00:51:43,540 --> 00:51:53,200 What the consequences for the emergence of such a strong and increasingly effective Dallis identity? 463 00:51:53,200 --> 00:52:02,560 When I studied these things in many years ago, and it was in the context of answers, as it were, non Brahmin movements. 464 00:52:02,560 --> 00:52:12,490 And so the phrase that Full-day, the subject to my pitch they used was shoulder to shoulder. 465 00:52:12,490 --> 00:52:18,100 But we wouldn't release those sorts of alliances, I think. 466 00:52:18,100 --> 00:52:26,280 And in real political terms, the alliances that ship that food I envisaged between. 467 00:52:26,280 --> 00:52:33,400 Farmer costs of of every social class and active shooters, 468 00:52:33,400 --> 00:52:39,790 adults that we would we would barely think of those alliances in political terms these days. 469 00:52:39,790 --> 00:52:49,580 You know, what we have is it's a substantive and in a way autonomous Dalit movement, 470 00:52:49,580 --> 00:52:59,510 which stands apart from and doesn't really affect his his very existence is an implicit critique of caste as a whole. 471 00:52:59,510 --> 00:53:10,130 And so I wonder what the I wonder what the longer term implications for caste and for making caste into a term like race, 472 00:53:10,130 --> 00:53:16,640 which is, you know, right now we think of as it's it's something that doesn't exist. 473 00:53:16,640 --> 00:53:20,470 We think of it as racism, which certainly does exist. 474 00:53:20,470 --> 00:53:32,570 I I wonder whether the existence itself of adult movement, which is a standing reproach to everybody who thinks and acts on the basis of caste, 475 00:53:32,570 --> 00:53:44,840 whether in some way that will over time make car draw cast into into a closer approximation to the term race again, 476 00:53:44,840 --> 00:53:48,770 which is also not something that's inherent. 477 00:53:48,770 --> 00:53:57,120 But it is a social construct and can therefore be changed. I don't know what it said. 478 00:53:57,120 --> 00:54:04,100 That's rather rambling question, but it's one that I certainly think is very important for us to consider. 479 00:54:04,100 --> 00:54:10,440 I found these things are likely to develop in that direction because that would that would change the whole perspective, 480 00:54:10,440 --> 00:54:14,640 would change all of these discussions, I think. Yeah, absolutely. 481 00:54:14,640 --> 00:54:18,480 I think that's a really, really important point. I know we're almost out of time. 482 00:54:18,480 --> 00:54:22,050 We got five minutes left. Polly, can I sort of pause two questions to you, 483 00:54:22,050 --> 00:54:28,410 given that this is something you've been working on for a while and these are taken from the questions that we have here. 484 00:54:28,410 --> 00:54:33,960 One is from Srini, the way I should say is that we tend to think that cost is religious, 485 00:54:33,960 --> 00:54:40,740 sanction is rooted in religion, and that's not true of Greece. But she's wondering if it's more complicated than that. 486 00:54:40,740 --> 00:54:48,600 So the question is, you know, what about white evangelical Christian movements that conceptualise race and racism in theological terms? 487 00:54:48,600 --> 00:54:51,630 I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, but the other question, 488 00:54:51,630 --> 00:54:59,640 but sort of which has come up in a couple of them is on the space of gender and the role of gender in this. 489 00:54:59,640 --> 00:55:04,060 And I was wondering whether you in particular, given, you know, your amazing work on this, 490 00:55:04,060 --> 00:55:11,040 whether you would like to talk about the intersection of race, cost and gender. 491 00:55:11,040 --> 00:55:16,260 Well, I'm sorry. Very big questions. What goes through its agenda? 492 00:55:16,260 --> 00:55:29,330 Religion and. For the second question, I think I mean, I'm a historian, so I'm afraid I seek refuge in specificity. 493 00:55:29,330 --> 00:55:37,260 No one can see. One can see forms of cultural universal, which for historians is actually quite a dirty word, 494 00:55:37,260 --> 00:55:45,240 forms of almost a cultural universal in which difference of differences of esteem between communities, 495 00:55:45,240 --> 00:55:50,880 between classes are marked by differential access to women. 496 00:55:50,880 --> 00:55:55,500 So, you know, to put a very crude put it very crudely, 497 00:55:55,500 --> 00:56:07,650 the superior community has access to the women of the supposedly inferior community in ways which is simply not reciprocally possible. 498 00:56:07,650 --> 00:56:17,920 So I think, you know, class, race and gender have that in common. 499 00:56:17,920 --> 00:56:24,720 And no doubt they have all sorts of other things in common. But I think the dynamics of the way that they work, 500 00:56:24,720 --> 00:56:30,690 particularly in terms of understandings of male and female identity and what happens at marriage and 501 00:56:30,690 --> 00:56:44,400 what sorts of the different types of prohibition that mark marriages across race and across class, 502 00:56:44,400 --> 00:56:56,190 I think are very different. The question of whether caste is caste cost like behaviour comes out of out of religion. 503 00:56:56,190 --> 00:57:01,590 Well, yes, it does. You know, one can see I'm sure it's no accident. 504 00:57:01,590 --> 00:57:07,890 And my colleagues amongst the American historical community, I hope will forgive me, 505 00:57:07,890 --> 00:57:18,120 but I can't think it is an accident that white evangelical Christianity is one of the biggest supporters of the present, 506 00:57:18,120 --> 00:57:26,350 the re-election of the present incumbent, with all of the prospect, with all of the defensiveness of America's, 507 00:57:26,350 --> 00:57:33,980 the rights and privileges of America's slowly declining numbers of white voters. 508 00:57:33,980 --> 00:57:40,440 But that said, I think it would be a mistake to think of cost as something that simply comes out of religion. 509 00:57:40,440 --> 00:57:49,020 I think cost is a very complex set of combined set of forms of valuation, forms of interpretation, 510 00:57:49,020 --> 00:57:59,070 forms of belief, but also very physical to understand associations between occupation, 511 00:57:59,070 --> 00:58:03,060 between dirt, between forms of dirt, assumptions about dirt, 512 00:58:03,060 --> 00:58:12,240 assumptions about impurity that are not just in the mind, but also may be something that we see on the body. 513 00:58:12,240 --> 00:58:16,470 And so I would like to see it cast in those terms. 514 00:58:16,470 --> 00:58:24,720 And if anything, costs described and understood much more as a set of understandings about the body. 515 00:58:24,720 --> 00:58:28,680 Of course you do then come back to religion because you know, the. 516 00:58:28,680 --> 00:58:39,780 Why is the Delattre done it? If you ask God if he were to ask a Brahmin of the last century, he would say it's because of karma. 517 00:58:39,780 --> 00:58:49,500 So sobered up. For my own part, I would like to see a much stronger emphasis on on cost of social practise, 518 00:58:49,500 --> 00:59:04,230 on Koster's based and based on ideas about about impurity, about aversion as much as religious concepts. 519 00:59:04,230 --> 00:59:08,190 So I think we're sort of out of time. I've just got to reedited last common. 520 00:59:08,190 --> 00:59:14,030 But they just because I think it's important to say that they're just seeing the light, the OBC alliances still exist. 521 00:59:14,030 --> 00:59:19,380 Goshute arm had built a great movement around it. But I've seen it each of these aspects back Adamec. 522 00:59:19,380 --> 00:59:26,160 Except by scholars like Jefa law. And it was sort of an important point to perhaps end on, which is that, you know, 523 00:59:26,160 --> 00:59:32,160 there is a world sort of politics of knowledge production and what it is that we seek to centre and what we don't and what alliances we see. 524 00:59:32,160 --> 00:59:37,740 And, you know, the way we read the history or the politics or that biography around it. 525 00:59:37,740 --> 00:59:43,050 And, you know, in a way, this conversation today was sort of meant for assortative in conversation. 526 00:59:43,050 --> 00:59:50,280 But to open it out to a much wider conversation around the world, to think about the intersection of race, caste, gender, class, 527 00:59:50,280 --> 00:59:59,880 hierarchy, and and also sort of acknowledge Black History Month and sort of, you know, be a little academic tribute to it. 528 00:59:59,880 --> 01:00:06,210 Photosphere. But did you have any final words before we come to a close? 529 01:00:06,210 --> 01:00:11,160 I think tetras is absolutely right. Of course, we shouldn't forget this. 530 01:00:11,160 --> 01:00:20,250 You know, just as we see some of the most difficult social tensions between Dalit communities and what we would describe in many contexts as a. 531 01:00:20,250 --> 01:00:23,860 Bases. We also see fantastic alliances. 532 01:00:23,860 --> 01:00:32,430 I also think I'd like also to acknowledge Siyam Tiny's point, that we've been talking in casual all year terms. 533 01:00:32,430 --> 01:00:40,590 And of course, the local settings of caste in India are so very different. 534 01:00:40,590 --> 01:00:50,930 And we have certainly paid insufficient attention to those that the regional cost structures, of course, 535 01:00:50,930 --> 01:00:57,090 are very, very much between north and south, between east central and the west and even within those areas. 536 01:00:57,090 --> 01:01:04,590 And so I think we can we must apologise for taking the liberty of talking in these all India terms. 537 01:01:04,590 --> 01:01:14,400 But I'm sure we both know Nico and I have been very grateful to you for your comments and we've learnt much from these conversations. 538 01:01:14,400 --> 01:01:28,680 And we hope perhaps in the future, too, in this era of Zoome opportunity as much as Zoome tyranny and hope perhaps to be able to do this again. 539 01:01:28,680 --> 01:01:33,300 Thank you very much. Yes. Thank you all very much for being here. Thanks, buddy. 540 01:01:33,300 --> 01:01:42,361 Thanks, Nate. Thank you.