Showing posts with label caste. Show all posts
Showing posts with label caste. Show all posts

Monday, November 30, 2020

Quibbling with Caste

 Started reading Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents". I want to quibble with some sentences on page 29: 

"[The South] was where the tenets of intercaste relations took hold before spreading to the rest of the country..." (There follows a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville with a similar point.) 

I think this is wrong: slavery was a feature of the world before Europeans reached the Americas.  It was a part of the Old Testament, it was part of medieval times, it was an accepted feature of war. It was arguably part of many Native American societies.  There was slavery in Great Britain until the Somerset decision.

The bottom line is: we can't blame the South for slavery, which is the way I read Wilkerson.  She can argue that slavery on Southern plantations was developed into an American archetype, perhaps with some unique features.  But even there, she would need to recognize the differences between Southern slavery and Caribbean sugar plantations. 

As I said, it's a quibble.  Wilkerson's writing at a level of generality and artistry with which I'm not terribly comfortable.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Slavery and Caste Systems

Having read Ants Among Elephants (see yesterday's post) I'm musing about the similarities and differences between the caste system and slavery.

Did a google search, with limited results--I don't see a solid academic study, just some student work or summaries that can go off track. This might be the best one, throwing in "class system" and "meritocracy" as well as slavery and caste. One big problem is comparing different times and different countries.

What's striking to me from Ants is the use of force to enforce caste boundaries.  As it happens, a front page article in the Post today is an account of an honor killing, a Dalit married a woman of a trading caste, her father hired men to kill him.  Force obviously was used in slavery.  Which one was/is more violent.

In both cases (chattel slavery and caste system), the position is inherited by child from parent. In chattel slavery the law backs the social norms; apparently in the caste system social norms were  sufficient. And in India these days the law doesn't support the system.

It seems some social mobility is possible in both systems.  Certainly the family described in Ants is mobile, though their upward progress seems a function of the changing laws.  Their progress seems more problematic than some mobility under slavery.  The key difference might be the ownership: if your owner was your father and/or enlightened, he could boost you.  Since Dalits have no owner, that doesn't work.

On the other hand, there might be more unity among the caste (considering Dalits as a caste) than there was in slavery.  Perhaps, perhaps not.

[Added:  Other important differences:

  • there seems to be no boss, no slave driver in the caste system. That might mean more "freedom" in one's daily routine, more akin to the "task" system in rice culture than the "driver" in cotton system.
  • mobility within the caste is restrcted--no house slaves versus field slaves, no chance to become a skilled artisan]