No minute. Right. I'm going to send you. OK.
OK. Well, they. Welcome to everyone to the first modern South Asian Studies seminar of the new academic year at Oxford.
My name is Danica Munther and I'm associate professor and anthropology of South Asia here at Oxford.
I'm going to be in conversation with my colleague, Professor Paul Yohanan, who is professor in Indian history and culture at Oxford.
As you all know, the topic of the session is global histories of hierarchy.
Reflections from India on Cost Race and the Black Lives Matter movement.
I'm good. I just see a a sort of short introduction, just a few words on the thinking behind the seminar team.
So it's been an extraordinary year for the world. And we're beginning this new session and welcoming new students and colleagues under
rather difficult circumstances not to take recourse to an English understatement.
The pandemic and the differentiated suffering it has caused along lines of race, caste,
gender and class is an important reminder of the sealants of these identities and how lethal they quite literally can be.
At the same time, the death of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement globally has opened a new,
certain political and intellectual questions. We, as scholars of India,
are trained in the social sciences and humanities propose considering them through
a situation of the literature of this longstanding literature on inequality,
on caste, on hierarchy, on violence from from this region.
Now, an immediate provocation for this conversation.
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.
It is, of course, Black History Month here in the UK.
And we see this conversation today as part of our attempt to mark its significance in the spirit of this
discussion that hopes to situate the correspondences between race and cost while a perspective from India.
It is incumbent upon me to also mention what happened in hot-air us in the North Indian state of what the police recently.
I know most of you are well aware of this incident, but it bears recounting here at the very outset all the same.
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,
she testified to the gang rape.
Yet another testimony of the intersection of cost and gender, as well as the prevalence of Gosta atrocities in contemporary India.
Again, as is well known by now, many shows family was not given a corpse to commit,
but rather the police forcibly burnt a body against a family's explicit wishes under the cover of darkness.
Disturbingly, there've been several attempts by the government and bar to downplay the feud and cover up the repeat rape
and murder attesting to the prevalence of institutionalised caste ism in the very aboutus of the state.
Now, this horrific incident has led to a spate of protests in India and beyond with the slogan of Dalit lives matter.
If this conversation between all of us assembled here is one of considering
correspondences between race and cost as entrenched structures of inequality.
Wilens that question then what is being described as the hot rusada brings a swarm of the starkest way possible.
At the same time, the mimicking of the language and visuals of political mobilisation around Black
Lives Matter and Dalit Lives Matter opens out larger questions for the Academy,
such as How do our longstanding research interests respond to these particular Mormans in time?
What can the stretch do to John? Cost and inequality from India contribute to our thinking of race and inequality more globally.
What forms of solidarities? Political, institutional, social. Does this push us to strive for?
And how might that teaching our thinking. Writing citation or practises disciplinary orientations and public engagement be transformed
through an engagement with and by a centring of Black Lives Matter as well as Dalit lives matter?
Not before I had a word to Professor O'Hanlan, who's gonna get us started on thinking historically about the relation between
race and cost and who's also going to offer a reading of Wilkerson's book.
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,
as well as the course director of the modern South Asian Studies,
degrees for taking a lead on organising all the seminars for this entire year over year olds.
Extremely grateful to Claire Soldo from the Asian Studies Centre at St. Anthony's College.
And Stephen, my name from the Oxford School of Global Nerea Studies,
who've been sort of heroically managing the logistics and the technology behind the series.
Just on the question, technology. As you can see, we are recording this conversation.
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.
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.
There is a Q&A box on the site which is open for comments, questions.
Peace talks. Anything you basically wish.
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.
Due to constraints of time, we might not be able to read out or respond to everyone, but we'll try our absolute best.
So please bear with us. Okay. So just over to Pollino.
Polymathic is still muted. Thank you very much, Ninotchka.
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.
Zoome teams become so much a part of our lives.
So there's not, Ekert indicated. One of the occasions for this conversation is Isabel Wilkerson's important new book,
Cost The Origins of Our Discontents, published in the USA in August.
Let me offer here a brief outline.
It's a book principally about race and racial antagonisms in the USA, in which Wilkerson suggests that entrenched racial divides in the USA,
which are currently such a pressing issue across the world, are in fact better understood as a form of cost.
Wilkinson takes her definition of cost principally from the Indian experience as a form of social hierarchy represented as an emanating from divine,
well understood to be inherited from one generation to the next,
which enforces heredity in occupations, restriction of marriage, relations within the cost,
community norms around notions of purity and pollution, dehumanisation and stigma attached to costs.
At the bottom of the hierarchy, the enforcement of caste discipline through fear and violence and an intellectual
superiority ascribed to those we would call them Brahmins at the apex of the system.
Wilkerson argues that cost in this form is actually a universal feature of social organisation presence over millennia in India,
emerging again in the slave societies of the USA and their later inheritance in modern day racial divides
visible also in European fascism and the Holocaust that it brought about in the middle of the 20th century.
Now, Wilkerson doesn't suggest that there's always a kind of direct transmission of ideas and institutions between these manifestations.
She does say that there are sometimes connexions, as in the officials dispatched from Germany to the USA in the 1930s,
to look for racially based models of social segregation that might be applied to Jews and other stigmatised communities in Germany.
Rather, Wilkerson suggests that the tendency to think and act in ways that privilege some and stigmatise others is actually innate.
What she calls, quote, the human pyramid encrypted into us all.
Race has been one important modern and particularly entrenched manifestation of this tendency,
but it's only a manifestation of a deeper and innate human drive.
In describing this very appropriately, Wilkison takes up the analogy of the human body itself.
Race is malleable in changing one type of skin, as it were,
that lines over what she depicts as the hard skeleton of cast beneath cast as the enduring propensity
of humans to create and enforce structures of esteem and stigma wherever they find themselves.
So there's much to think about here, not just for scholars of race in the USA, but for students of South Asian societies,
where a key social institutions such as caste is just generalised as the underlying paradigm for all human inequality.
There is an obvious question for anthropologist's.
In the elements of structural funk's functionalism that Wilkinson has clearly taken on from the social anthropologists of the 1940s and 50s,
who also saw caste forms of caste in the segregation of the American South.
But in deploying this argument, in the changed circumstances of our own times where the black lives matter across the world,
the movement across the world has pushed questions of rate race so powerfully to the forefront of the political conversation.
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,
race and racism have lost almost all of their real analytical value.
Rather, as she points out, they've become morally charged terms of reprimand and shame,
allowing those who disagree on the principles of racism that perpetuate its practises to avoid challenge and confrontation.
It's useful, I think certainly was very useful for me to remind ourselves of the long history of conversation and parallel analysis,
these between African-American scholars and activists and their counterparts in India
and other parts of South Asia campaigning for low cost and done it communities.
Taking me back to my long ago PHC research Maharastra as Jyoti Rao, fully writing shortly after the American Civil War,
called his research into low cost and Dalit conditions good Ungarie slavery.
And he dedicated to what he called the good people of the US for their struggles against slavery.
There's the less direct conversation, but certainly parallel concerns.
Again, this is very familiar ground between Dr Ambedkar and his contemporary.
The US civil rights activist Professor W.E. B. Du Bois and Budka used some of his time in Columbia between 1913 and 16,
taking courses in social anthropology, where he was particularly influenced by Franz Boas,
who rejected contemporary understandings of race as innate difference and instead emphasised race as a cultural and social construct.
From this and Badcoe develops his understanding of untouchability not as a form of race, but rather a social and cultural difference.
But difference presenting a much greater resistance to change than slavery because laws could emancipate the slave, he argued.
Whereas untouchability was a consequence of religious obligation and so much more difficult to remove deploy.
On the other hand, the analytic of cost a combination of social and bodily ranking.
Played a central role in his understanding of social and political life in the Jim Crow era of reconstruction,
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.
The anthropologist Allison Davis in 1941 used it gonna model and used it in 1944.
Talking of the race based caste system of post reconstruction, the USA,
other Connexions and conversations are so well known as I mentioned them only briefly.
The Dalit welcome extended to Martin Luther King during his brief visit to India in 1959.
The US Black Panther movement of the 1980s, which provided much inspiration for India's Dalit panther movement of the early 1970s and after.
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.
With the growth of Dalit studies in US universities and the many small institutional initiatives aimed at bringing Dalit scholars to the US.
So Wilkerson is really the latest in a long line of scholars and activists who
have found the perspective of cast a refreshing new analytic in other contexts.
There are criticisms, of course, as you would expect,
Wilkerson's book gives a graphic and harrowing account of slavery and its long aftermath in the USA.
Its account. But it lives, though, is much more abbreviated.
And there is the question itself of a centralisation of caste in her wider argument.
Nonetheless, there is undoubtedly enormous value in the opening up of these intellectual and political connexions,
or are renewing them with the opportunities that they bring in these times of acute pressure for communities marginalised by race, caste and class.
One thing I think the book does draw attention to is the comparing the compelling
parallels between cost and race as different but congruent forms of hierarchy.
In the US setting following Wilkerson, the attempt to espersen subsume race into caste.
Only when we think of racial stigma and marginality as a form of caste.
Can we really comprehend its entrenched and all pervasive culture.
But in South Asia and amongst starlet's active in international arenas,
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.
During the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, held under the US's auspices of the UN dunnart,
representatives campaigned very hard to get cost recognised as a manifestation of racism.
They failed in the face of objections from the government of India, who insisted that the roots of racism actually lie outside India.
In the bio politics of the West, with its inheritances of slavery and colonialism in the UK, more recently,
Dalit activists fought long and hard to get cost recognised as a category of discrimination like race.
Under the UK's Equalities Act of 19 of 2010.
But again, they failed as opponents described the move as anti Hindu.
The dull It Lives Matter movement again seeks implicitly at least,
to connect cost to race and to demand that the international attention given to the
Black Lives Matter movement should have its equivalent for adults across South Asia,
whose circumstances are equally, if not sometimes even more challenging.
At the same time, one can't help but wonder how far this, as it were,
internationalisation of cost is actually helpful for the cause of Dalit and other marginal communities across the states and societies of South Asia.
On the one hand, it might have been a strategic gain to have it recognised that cost and cooperates elements
of discriminatory social practise that might be categorised elsewhere as modes of racism.
On the other hand, to have cost so generalised as to be the default form of all human discrimination
might be viewed from a conservative perspective as a very welcome move.
It alleviates the sense that caste might be a South Asian problem in particular.
Indirectly,
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.
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.
Cost is a very different thing. The homes cost of private identity and family social practise.
So perhaps in the end, Wilkerson's book does do us an additional service when it places cost and race in such direct conversation.
It makes us ask again what cost really is not only a social practise which pervades the public as well as the private sphere,
but what cost is as a term in public discourse, caste ism like racism, is a morally charged term of reproach.
But the simple term cost can be just an everyday descriptor or for those who prefer to avoid it,
the meaning that lies behind the more anodyne term community.
In these senses, it seems perhaps to an outsider like myself here in Oxford.
Very much shielded from the difficult challenges that I alluded to here.
That the perspective's opens up here offer huge opportunities, the chance to expand vital conversations.
But I also wonder and seek to learn from the reflections of colleagues who are actually closer,
much closer to these harsh choices, even as it seems to offer new possibilities of alliance.
As this internationalisation of cost not also suggest new ways in which it may seem once again presented to us as rooted in nature,
but this time through the idiom of global scholarship. So that's some very general and naive thoughts from me.
And let me hand over now to Nine Eker, who will pick up.
I think some of these things, Nonaka. Thank you, Polly, for the Stoodley brilliant and very elegant reading of Nickerson's book.
I just remind everyone who's here that there's the Q&A box here on the site.
So if you have any questions from or any comments or thoughts on what Polly has just said or you know,
or on this topic in general, please start adding them now.
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
anthropologist to think about the different ways in which disciplines have have looked at the relationship between recent cost in India.
Police have closed down this incredibly elegant and beautiful reading of it, which isn't just rooted in history.
It's, you know, it's sort of a multidisciplinary reading of it.
What I'm going to do before we sort of look back to some of the very important points that Polly just made,
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.
I have looked at this relationship between recent cost. Before we come on to Wilkerson's book.
And, you know, well, I was sort of reading this and thinking a bit more about this.
I was really fascinated by the changes in the ways in which anthropology, in sociology.
Have studied cost, but particularly in relation to race.
Now, what you can see when you look at this question of cost injuries from India is that actually in the 1940s,
it was the American sociologist like Allison Davis and the Gardiners, as Polly mentioned,
as well as people like John Dollard and Hortense Buttermaker,
who were looking at doing this deep ethnographic studies of what they call cost in the segregated South in the 1930s in America.
Now, the way in which they used costs at the time was very much in conjunction with class, but was also,
as Chris Fuller has argued, it was also used in a way to stay away from the blacks closer race.
But again, what Fuller has argued and what they have contributed, the Indian soldiers have also argued,
is that actually there was this woman in the 30s and 40s where costs became quite central to the ways in which Americans,
astrologists and anthropologists were studying what he would call race,
or there was fighting segregation or inequality and hierarchy in the United States.
But somehow, by the end of the 40s,
it never sort of didn't catch onto the conceptual aboutus within the disciplines of anthropology and sociology and the whole
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.
On the other hand, there was probably one of the earliest mentions amongst anthropologists of the relationship between cost and race was a nineteen
or eight by riskily who argued that the caste system originated needed from the encounter of race is really problematic.
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.
In his work in the 60s and 70s.
But sort of the really interesting point in Indian sociology, anthropology, when the discussion of race becomes quite, you know,
takes on sort of more meat sort of sea was a 1960s when General Betterment and Louis do more independently
published articles expressing very different opinions on the relationship between cost and race.
So if a better man who it's worth noting was drawing from his experience of living in Alabama,
as well as of doing fieldwork in that other one in northern India,
the to what he called the two car systems of the United States and India are truly similar.
And for him, the similarity between what he described as the core systems of the U.S. and India,
what we think of as race and cost was that the both of them, the fundamental feature board, is, quote, institutionalised inequality.
Now at about the same time, do more and we do more was the great French sociologist who wrote this on.
This big book called Homo Hierarchical, which is very forcefully shaped the field of Indian sociology,
announced apology, particularly when it comes to a study of cost, sort of completely rejected this.
And he wrote this piece in an appendix to the book Homo Hydrocrackers, where he said that actually this is a gross misunderstanding.
To say that what we call cost in India is the same as what we call race in America is profoundly wrong.
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.
And again, these are his terms. Cost was considered sort of intrinsic feature of India and it was normal,
whereas according to do more, this is what he considered pathological in America.
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,
was that it led to an abandonment of this comparison between cost and race in India within indents, astrology and anthropology.
Now, it's sort of interesting to see that, you know, again,
this is a slight tangent to this conversation, but I think at some levels it does fit into it.
And the point here is that actually it was a very forceful account by a leading sociologist at one
point who rejects this relationship between recent costs that led to to its sort of abandonment,
sort of see within that biography of intense astrology.
And this is despite the fact that homo hierarchical and Deewar have been criticised extensively, ad nauseum.
What would see. But it sort of still sticks on that.
This is not something this kind of comparison is not necessarily relevant.
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,
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,
and I'm quoting him,
Any attempt today to bring together race and cost for comparison and contrast is likely to meet with a cold reception, end of quote.
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.
And but that he basically looked at two things. He looked at what he called the sexual use and abuse of women.
And secondly, this unremitting concern with the purity of women at the top of the cost of that is hierarchy.
This wasn't really an argument he developed fully at the time. And somehow sort of again, it sort of petered out.
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,
but also actually given sort of the stark similarities between Black Lives Matter and that it lives matter as well as something new, sociology.
Brown's apology, if indeed that's coming up right now.
I think this also is actually a moment for us to think about the politics of knowledge production
and in what ways is it that certain categories are not considered productive and others are?
What are the ways in which we decide, as well as just anthropologists, to pursue the study of cost?
Now, it's we sort of know that much of the sociology and anthropology of India has been
written either by Upper-Class scholars or by white academics who tended to not
see caste and the writings or what is much more commonplace is that they have
located within certain marked out domains only where somehow caste becomes visible.
This this idea of costs becoming invisible is something that's been that's being sort of demeans.
And Richard is invisible.
It's something that has been radically challenged and disrupted by Dalit writers and some very important recent ethnographies, of course.
But the point is that I'm going to discuss this orthography is in a minute.
But I think the point I want to make here is that we cannot underplay the Haeju many of the scholarship of the
sort of long sort of weight of scholarship that has written outcaste from certain spaces or certain domains.
Now, I am taking my lead on this argument from David Morses recent article in modern Asian Studies on the Modernity of Cost.
Where he makes a very, very compelling argument about how the study of cost has been corralled, sort of see into certain spheres.
I'm actually just going to quote him. Yeah. So he says this article, quote,
argues that the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public policy enclosure of cost in the non modern realm of religion and caste politics,
while aligning modernity to cost, erasing market economy, caste processes, enclosure's and evasions that both globalisation,
India suggest the need to rethink the modernity of cost beyond Orientalists and post-colonial frameworks.
And of course,
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,
how it's very much part of the market.
Asked functions functions as a form of resource, Howcast is able to exclude people who had materially disadvantages gullets, for instance.
And I think what he also does really powerfully in this work and which is what's coming out from
some of the new sort of some of this fantastic new literature which is engaging directly with
cost and race is really this idea of how there has been a long sort of history of sociology and
anthropology where you start to notice and see cost only in certain domains and not in others.
Right. Such as the domain of politics, such as the domain of exactly as Polly said,
in the private sphere or within something like marriage rather than in spaces like the market economy,
where you somehow think the forces of modernity have overtaken it.
Now, I'm going to quickly what I'm going to do in the next sort of four,
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,
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.
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.
Now, of course, of a prominent amongst this is on the question of race and cost.
Is the writing of sort of Genndy, who has written this book, which became an instant bestseller.
Cost Matters. He's also credited with on until probably a book on Ambedkar Sooraj Yang.
They wrote a cover story for Caravan magazine just earlier this year in July, which was entitled Race Cost.
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.
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.
She's talking about tomography in 80 Madras and the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras.
How sort of this language embedded invisible Lazes costs privilege in India.
And she also notes that this is a similar to the United States where, you know,
those Americans were least disadvantaged by racism, are most likely to endorse the country as post-racial.
And this is very similar to those Indians who have benefited anomalous enormously from
Zappacosta creation and who refuse to see caste or declared themselves cost less in some way.
Of course, there's some really fantastic work on classlessness that's coming out by astrologist in India, such as official responded,
who've talked about how classlessness becomes something that is, you know,
a sort of that operates in particular ways in different domains within India.
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.
But it has a lot of echoes with precisely those arguments.
We also have geographers, urban geographers, historical geographers who started working on racialisation in India.
So there was an anti board work workshop last year and week thinking difference in India that studied the links, as I described,
between myriad forms of social difference, which included caste, tribe, ethnicity, faith and broader understandings of race, racism and racialisation.
So I'm not going to make this into a laundry list of people who are studying the race relation.
But I just wanted to flag that as something that is is emerging from this work in India, which is really promising and exciting.
And again, I want to end by not offering an exhaustive list of where perhaps we can see this discussion and discourse going forward.
But I'm good to just offer out some thoughts on how we can perhaps discuss it further in our conversation right now.
So one of the ways in which I think race and cost can be really productively studied together intellectually is actually in
the context of the climate crisis and the ecological ecological collapse that you're not at all sort of standing in the face.
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.
And the question is, can we see similar developments or work on the climate crisis in South Asia,
which makes these links between empire cost and capitalism more clearly?
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,
who's worked on environmental justice in America, as well as the relationship between colonial history and contemporary struggles at on cost,
identity and environmental outcomes in urban India and other sort of field where you
can see this relationship between cost and reduce really coming out quite strongly.
It's more graphically is in our work on the Indian diaspora.
So if Indians will sort of settled outside India, but somehow caste, you don't sort of lose it when you know.
What are the shores of any go beyond the nation state, so to say they're being base striking cases of cost azem,
such as, for instance, in companies in Silicon Valley, begin.
Polly has already mentioned the intense lobbying that went on in the UK to
prevent cost discrimination from being listed in the UK equalities legislation.
But again, you can constantly see costs coming up in the UK when it comes to legislations and insurers
and work on forced marriages and honour killings in the UK and the cost basis of this.
There are another sort of strand which probably needs to be developed a bit more,
but we can again see some really interesting ethnographic work coming out is on looking at institutions of the state.
So there is a very robust literature on what he calls structural racism or institutional racism,
which has been written by black feminist writers, which has been written by black authors.
And what we can see emerging out of India is the sort of awareness,
and that's biological and sociological literature on things like institutional Gosta Surman,
structural cost ism and how the built into, for instance, the police or upper or upper echelons of the bureaucracy.
But again, these are things that we are still sort of working through that there is there are some
a few really good ethnographies that look at the cost dimension of the state itself.
One of the ways in which I personally found my own understanding of especially that it's
got to shift more spitefully enhanced is by reading the memoirs of Dalit scholars,
especially of women, Dalit scholars. So I'm thinking heard of Yasuoka.
That's very powerful book coming out as valid as well as such other good laws and amongst elephants, again, incredibly powerful.
Yes, but that also has an excellent review of Isabel Wilkerson's book in Foreign Policy,
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.
But that really see is that what Wilkison is doing is that she's really serving a uniquely American argument.
And what is very powerful about Wilkerson's book is that the Indian state has been doing all this diplomatic
manual work to keep cost and the notorious ness of cost and cost atrocities out of a global lie.
But what Wilkison is able to do is she sort of reveals it. But at the same time,
due to this problem with the centralisation of cost and not looking at contemporary Dalit struggles in India to
sort of unfortunately invisible eyes is sort of the kind of marginalisation of contemporary India of Coston,
again, up completely. I'm sure without intention. But she somehow plays into those arguments of which are made up into the India that
cost is this archaic institution that will somehow whether it'll be on its own.
And finally, I sort of have to end with this because, again, this is sort of my personal research interests.
The places where I can see cost literature on cost coming out very powerfully
is within multi species demography when it comes to looking at the non-human.
This is particularly true when you look at the politics around beef or on food politics and on bovine politics,
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,
very profound ways. So I'm going to sort of end here.
And this as I said, this is just some preliminary thoughts. We'd love to sort of get questions from the rest of you.
I can see that the quite a few out there already.
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.
If I see your name, I'm gonna just read that out.
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.
Polly, do you have any that you would like to take first?
Well, I wonder if we might start with this direct question that we have at the top from Cuomo.
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.
I mean, in some senses, within that simple question I posed, as it were,
the question that the questions that you and I have found ourselves trying to ask.
And of course, it in some ways,
it it points to differences in the forms of solidarity amongst African-American communities in the United
States and the more limited forms of solidarity amongst the smaller and weaker dollar communities in India.
I mean, one can think of a whole host of answers.
And one what one hopes is that conversations that Wilkerson's book, the Congos Wilkerson's book, have enabled will will help, too.
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.
Just listening to you, Ninotchka, I just wanted to throw in one final idea about why it is that and that for some people,
caste and race seem important parallels, and for others they seem to have very little to do with one another.
And obviously part of the answer to that is political. And I wondered whether having read Wilkerson's book, whether,
in fact it might help us to see much more in common than we normally do between
the forms of marginalisation and stigmatisation that are there in race and cost,
in both which these forms are based very much in social practise and in in understandings of the body, those things on one hand.
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.
And I think those in the utility of race and its Solidarity's and the utility of costs for those who for whom caste
communities are a critical safety net to our sphere of sociability are an opportunity for political alliance,
an opportunity to press the state, the Indian state for access to reservations and other social benefits.
So I'm if a direction for scholarly research doesn't lie in trying to separate
out those two and which would make the parent comparisons easier to explore,
but in a way which doesn't isn't interrupted by people pointing out that there
will actually race and cost is so very different than these other ways anyway.
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,
that is a way in which one can sort of get bogged down in certain aspects of the comparison rather
than thinking about the ways in which can be marshalled for more progressive political positions.
I completely agree. Should we take this question about Scheel?
I think it's an important one where I think he's saying that.
So I just read it out in our investigation of cost. Can religion really be ignored for being a private cultural sphere?
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,
might ignore the critical question of confronting the religious foundations of caste in India?
This is, after all, an important difference between recent caste Gosta sanctified by Hinduism.
So if I could just quickly your part. Yes, I completely agree.
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.
I think it's absolutely impossible to see that.
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,
what he is trying to say or what there is that there are certain spaces where cost is not considered,
which are thought to be doing a B with cost, are supposed to be able to challenge caste in certain ways.
And what he's argued through is ethnographic work as well as through these
quantitative studies is that actually Goss' is being is very active within it.
So the point that was just to say that we see caste. This is where it does a normally.
Study draw, other than to say that it isn't there. And in other areas, such as the private or the culture.
And you are absolutely right that religion absolutely needs to be at the centre of this.
Polly, did you have any thoughts on Bart's question? Well,
I suppose I suppose what I'd want to point to that I thought wasn't covered in wasn't
very seriously looked at in Wilkerson's book because and that's kind of understandable.
Is the link between cost and religion in the very powerful drive still?
We're still in it towards cost and Ogami. And not just cost and dominate, but high Pogany.
The idea that the idea that women should always marry socially equals or should marry upwards.
And as we know, those ideas about Teich high pergament off Hindu ideas in the book in the broad sense of that term,
in that within, as it were, Hindu social theory,
when a man and a woman marry the woman takes on the man's identity, as Munu puts it,
and no one would say they tend to ism is simply money, but money does put it.
When a man and a woman marry, the woman merges into the man's identity just as the river.
When the river reaches the ocean, it takes on, it merges with the ocean.
So a marriage that is based on Hypponen.
He works for everybody because the woman takes on the identity of the man.
And so the woman's family, as it were, is is at least unchanged in its social status.
And if a woman marries a man is superior status, the woman's whole family is lifted up by that connexion.
If a woman marries, as it were, against the grain, pretty low in a case of hypovolemic,
everybody loses because the woman's family loses status because she has marriage, as it were, beneath her.
The man's family doesn't gain because the woman's identity is dissolved and that of the man.
And and these are understandings of the relationship between the masculine and the feminine,
which are which are that they are there in many religions, but they are certainly there in Hindu social thought.
And so it's for that reason, of course. And this is a familiar thing for anthropologists to say.
For that reason, marriage strategies are such an important part of a family's envisaging of its of its own social strategy moving forward.
You know, what kinds of marriage connexion can we make?
Decisions about marriage? Certainly.
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.
So so I think it's a very long answer to Pastor Sheila's question.
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.
But I have an interest in gender. And so the aspect of of and dogor me not just and dogma,
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.
Should critics out there could be. Veev question next, who says do you think the treatment of caste Andres and other fields like political
science and international relations have been adequate as an IRS scholar,
feel that the disciplines that aren't speaking to each other and would like to lay out thoughts.
So if I could say that I don't know the I ah feel that well,
but I think that is a really interesting difference in the way in which different disciplines study cost.
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.
And it's very interesting to see the slight differences that inflexions the ways in which the debates have gone, etc.
My sense is that I out in particular doesn't be that much attention to cost.
And I wonder but that that might have something to do with the arguments that certain
people like such of the Subramanium we've been making about cost or about the idea
that sort of the fact that actually institutions of the state have not been studied
through a sort of a cost or agenda length as adequate quickly as they might have.
So speaking as someone who works on the state and India, I can see that it's kind of shocking how.
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.
I don't know if you have any ideas on this. I think you said I'm not an eye or specialist at all.
So I think, you know, I think you've said.
I would have sent an organiser. So. Let's move on to another question.
Absolutely. There's a question by a pool.
My life might be who ask on the quick undercuts a Berryman's comparison as a whole to say,
I do not agree with how he created a completely new definition of cost as a hierarchy of dogmas,
divisions, and which membership has had a degree and permanent.
He does pound point out the similarities between the two societies in terms of institutionalised inequality.
The rules of avoidance between cost or typing. Punishment for defined sexual gains and rationalisation of cost status.
But he disregards the fundamental influence of culture and also colonialism.
His article felt superficial to me as he tries to haphazardly fit his research into his own new conceptions.
He doublets from the mean objective.
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.
I also don't agree with Berryman's conception as a whole. I found it.
You know, I found it. In fact, I would agree with many of your criticisms.
I also think your point about the ways in which colonialism I am biased, completely written on the Mogra fee is quite problematic.
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.
And we got into a bit of a debate here, do more. I think he made a good number.
Dalva at a workshop together would do more. And they got into this argument on the risk cost question.
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,
which is on, you know, what are the ways in which we can think about cost azem and racism together?
And if we follow, what Betterment is seeing is he would argue that they're actually based similar.
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.
It's kind of implicit in them.
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.
What the consequences for the emergence of such a strong and increasingly effective Dallis identity?
When I studied these things in many years ago, and it was in the context of answers, as it were, non Brahmin movements.
And so the phrase that Full-day, the subject to my pitch they used was shoulder to shoulder.
But we wouldn't release those sorts of alliances, I think.
And in real political terms, the alliances that ship that food I envisaged between.
Farmer costs of of every social class and active shooters,
adults that we would we would barely think of those alliances in political terms these days.
You know, what we have is it's a substantive and in a way autonomous Dalit movement,
which stands apart from and doesn't really affect his his very existence is an implicit critique of caste as a whole.
And so I wonder what the I wonder what the longer term implications for caste and for making caste into a term like race,
which is, you know, right now we think of as it's it's something that doesn't exist.
We think of it as racism, which certainly does exist.
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,
whether in some way that will over time make car draw cast into into a closer approximation to the term race again,
which is also not something that's inherent.
But it is a social construct and can therefore be changed. I don't know what it said.
That's rather rambling question, but it's one that I certainly think is very important for us to consider.
I found these things are likely to develop in that direction because that would that would change the whole perspective,
would change all of these discussions, I think. Yeah, absolutely.
I think that's a really, really important point. I know we're almost out of time.
We got five minutes left. Polly, can I sort of pause two questions to you,
given that this is something you've been working on for a while and these are taken from the questions that we have here.
One is from Srini, the way I should say is that we tend to think that cost is religious,
sanction is rooted in religion, and that's not true of Greece. But she's wondering if it's more complicated than that.
So the question is, you know, what about white evangelical Christian movements that conceptualise race and racism in theological terms?
I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, but the other question,
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.
And I was wondering whether you in particular, given, you know, your amazing work on this,
whether you would like to talk about the intersection of race, cost and gender.
Well, I'm sorry. Very big questions. What goes through its agenda?
Religion and. For the second question, I think I mean, I'm a historian, so I'm afraid I seek refuge in specificity.
No one can see. One can see forms of cultural universal, which for historians is actually quite a dirty word,
forms of almost a cultural universal in which difference of differences of esteem between communities,
between classes are marked by differential access to women.
So, you know, to put a very crude put it very crudely,
the superior community has access to the women of the supposedly inferior community in ways which is simply not reciprocally possible.
So I think, you know, class, race and gender have that in common.
And no doubt they have all sorts of other things in common. But I think the dynamics of the way that they work,
particularly in terms of understandings of male and female identity and what happens at marriage and
what sorts of the different types of prohibition that mark marriages across race and across class,
I think are very different. The question of whether caste is caste cost like behaviour comes out of out of religion.
Well, yes, it does. You know, one can see I'm sure it's no accident.
And my colleagues amongst the American historical community, I hope will forgive me,
but I can't think it is an accident that white evangelical Christianity is one of the biggest supporters of the present,
the re-election of the present incumbent, with all of the prospect, with all of the defensiveness of America's,
the rights and privileges of America's slowly declining numbers of white voters.
But that said, I think it would be a mistake to think of cost as something that simply comes out of religion.
I think cost is a very complex set of combined set of forms of valuation, forms of interpretation,
forms of belief, but also very physical to understand associations between occupation,
between dirt, between forms of dirt, assumptions about dirt,
assumptions about impurity that are not just in the mind, but also may be something that we see on the body.
And so I would like to see it cast in those terms.
And if anything, costs described and understood much more as a set of understandings about the body.
Of course you do then come back to religion because you know, the.
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.
So sobered up. For my own part, I would like to see a much stronger emphasis on on cost of social practise,
on Koster's based and based on ideas about about impurity, about aversion as much as religious concepts.
So I think we're sort of out of time. I've just got to reedited last common.
But they just because I think it's important to say that they're just seeing the light, the OBC alliances still exist.
Goshute arm had built a great movement around it. But I've seen it each of these aspects back Adamec.
Except by scholars like Jefa law. And it was sort of an important point to perhaps end on, which is that, you know,
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.
And, you know, the way we read the history or the politics or that biography around it.
And, you know, in a way, this conversation today was sort of meant for assortative in conversation.
But to open it out to a much wider conversation around the world, to think about the intersection of race, caste, gender, class,
hierarchy, and and also sort of acknowledge Black History Month and sort of, you know, be a little academic tribute to it.
Photosphere. But did you have any final words before we come to a close?
I think tetras is absolutely right. Of course, we shouldn't forget this.
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.
Bases. We also see fantastic alliances.
I also think I'd like also to acknowledge Siyam Tiny's point, that we've been talking in casual all year terms.
And of course, the local settings of caste in India are so very different.
And we have certainly paid insufficient attention to those that the regional cost structures, of course,
are very, very much between north and south, between east central and the west and even within those areas.
And so I think we can we must apologise for taking the liberty of talking in these all India terms.
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.
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.
Thank you very much. Yes. Thank you all very much for being here. Thanks, buddy.
Thanks, Nate. Thank you.