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The caste system, its salient characteristics, and its subtle and more obvious transformations, coupled with its persistence and pervasiveness, have been central to studies of Indian society. This review provides a specific view of caste and its transformations with an emphasis on the socioeconomic or labor market dimension. Such a perspective is particularly crucial as one of the distinctive features of caste is the inheritance of occupations. A major argument of modernization has been the increasing movement away from occupational inheritance. This review traces the limited support for the \"Orientalist\" view of caste as essentially unchanging and focuses on the fluid nature of caste and its transformation in the economic domain.

2023 Best Book in the Humanities, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Challenging conventional narratives of Mexican history, this book establishes race-making as a central instrument for the repression of social upheaval in nineteenth-century Mexico rather than a relic of the colonial-era caste system. Many scholars assert that Mexico's complex racial hierarchy, inherited from Spanish colonialism, became obsolete by the turn of the nineteenth century as class-based distinctions became more prominent and a largely mestizo population emerged. But the residues of the colonial caste system did not simply dissolve after Mexico gained independence. Rather, Ana Sabau argues, ever-present fears of racial uprising among elites and authorities led to persistent governmental techniques and ideologies designed to separate and control people based on their perceived racial status, as well as to the implementation of projects for development in fringe areas of the country. Riot and Rebellion in Mexico traces this race-based narrative through three historical flashpoints: the Bajío riots, the Haitian Revolution, and the Yucatan's caste war. Sabau shows how rebellions were treated as racially motivated events rather than political acts and how the racialization of popular and indigenous sectors coincided with the construction of \"whiteness\" in Mexico. Drawing on diverse primary sources, Sabau demonstrates how the race war paradigm was mobilized in foreign and domestic affairs and reveals the foundations of a racial state and racially stratified society that persist today.

When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

When it comes to discourses around women's labor in global contexts, we need feminist philosophical frameworks that take the intersections of gender, race, and global capitalism seriously in order to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of women's lives within global processes. Women of color feminist philosophy can bring much to the table in such discussions. In this essay, I theorize about a concrete instance of global women's labor: transnational commercial gestational surrogacy. By introducing a \"racialized gender\" analysis into the philosophical debate on this issue, I argue that women's reproductive labor is becoming increasingly stratified within the global economy along racial and other lines. This paves the way for a \"transnational reproductive caste system,\" which ends up reifying various social hierarchies and sustaining existing global inequities. I aim to expose the kind of violence that surrogates experience due to such stratification as women of color in a transnational space. I discuss how discourses of race and existing racial hierarchies play out in international surrogacy and ways in which these, and indeed, the very category of \"woman of color\" get complicated in international contexts when they intermingle with other localized social forms and global inequities. For the purposes of my argument, I engage several insights from feminist of color Dorothy Roberts's work on race and reproductive technologies in the US.

Deep South (1941) is an ethnography of racial caste and class in Natchez, Mississippi, in the 1930s. This classic of functionalist social anthropology is particularly interesting because it describes a deeply divided and unequal modern society. In the American South, the population was divided into two endogamous `castes' and segregation ensured their almost complete social separation, with whites dominant over blacks. Each racial group was also divided by class, so that Natchez society was based on an elaborate caste-class hierarchy, whose characteristics are subtly explored in Deep South. None the less, although the caste concept was used by other American writers, most later social scientists preferred `ethnic group' or `race' itself. Caste in India has been compared with American racial caste, but anthropologists of India have scarcely exploited the insights to be derived from Deep South and similar studies. For understanding the institutions and values of hierarchy, Deep South remains invaluable. Deep South (1941) est une ethnographie des castes raciales et des classes à Natchez, dans le Mississippi des années 1930. Ce classique de l'anthropologie sociale fonctionnaliste est particulièrement intéressant en cela qu'il décrit une société moderne profondément divisée et inégalitaire. Dans le Sud des États-Unis, la population de l'époque était divisée en deux « castes » endogamiques et la ségrégation assurait une séparation sociale presque totale, les Blancs dominant les Noirs. Chaque groupe social était aussi divisé en classes, de sorte que la société de Natchez se fondait sur une complexe hiérarchie de caste et de classe dont Deep South explore subtilement les caractéristiques. Ceci étant dit, bien que d'autres auteurs américains aient aussi utilisé la notion de caste, la plupart des sociologues postérieurs ont préféré « groupe ethnique » ou « race ». Les castes indiennes ont été comparées aux castes raciales américaines, mais les anthropologues travaillant sur l'Inde ont très peu exploité l'éclairage que pouvaient apporter Deep South et d'autres études similaires. Or Deep South reste inestimable lorsqu'il s'agit de comprendre les institutions et les valeurs de la hiérarchie.

With the racial progress the nation has made over the past half century, including the growth of the black middle class and the election of a black president, many are now prepared to proclaim the United States a postracial society, where egalitarian values most often prevail; race is no longer a significant barrier to power, privilege, and prestige; and racial prejudice is mostly a thing of the past. When observed ethnographically, the lived experience of race relations suggests a different view and conceptual framework. As the legacy of racial caste, the color line persists in social interaction and is evident in racially determined perspectives and local working conceptions that order race relations and contribute to persistent racial inequality. Indeed, the claim of a postracial society is an ideological discourse that denies continuing patterns of race relations.

Research on economic inequality has largely focused on understanding the relationship between organizations and inequality but has paid limited attention to the role of institutions in the creation and maintenance of inequality. In this article, we use insights from the caste system—an institution that perpetuates socio-economic inequalities and limits human functions—to elaborate on three elements of economic inequality: uneven dispersions in resource endowments, uneven access to productive resources and opportunities, and uneven rewards to resource contributions. We argue that economic inequalities persist because these three different elements of inequality feed from and reinforce each other. Our study underscores the potential of the caste lens to inform research on economic inequality as well as organizational theory and practice.

In India, the convention has been that Hindus should participate in a religiously pre-defined occupation. Earlier studies have found evidence that while the Vaisyas caste dominated business, Brahmins maintained their traditional occupation as priests. The current study explores small business occupations in Udupi, a city in southern India. Our findings indicate a surge of Brahmins in business activities, indicating a move away from their traditional occupation. For their part, members of the Vaisyas caste continue their traditionally defined caste-based small business occupations. The study, limited in the generalizations it can justify because it is based on sampling in only a small portion of India, is reported here for the fascinating detail it conveys about a subject that is of sacred importance in India.

This paper empirically analyzes the association between caste and class in India. I find a tentative congruence between castes and classes at the extremes of the caste system and a slight weakening in this association over time. Although Scheduled Castes have low upward mobility, higher castes are not entirely protected from downward mobility.

Adolescent societies—whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships—exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, because global network features are generally treated as the agglomeration of micro-level tie-formation mechanisms, namely balance, homophily, and dominance. How do the same micro-mechanisms generate significant variation in global network structures? To answer this question we propose and test a network ecological theory that specifies the ways features of organizational environments moderate the expression of tie-formation processes, thereby generating variability in global network structures across settings. We develop this argument using longitudinal friendship data on schools (Add Health study) and classrooms (Classroom Engagement study), and by extending exponential random graph models to the study of multiple societies over time.