The Poison in the Gift by Gloria Goodwin Raheja
The Poison in the Gift is a detailed ethnography of gift-giving in a North Indian village that powerfully demonstrates a new theoretical interpretation of caste. Introducing the concept of ritual centrality, Raheja shows that the position of the dominant landholding caste in the village is grounded in a central-peripheral configuration of castes rather than a hierarchical ordering. She advances a view of caste as semiotically constituted of contextually shifting sets of meanings, rather than one overarching ideological feature. This new understanding undermines the controversial interpretation advanced by Louis Dumont in his 1966 book, Homo Hierarchicus, in which he proposed a disjunction between the ideology of hierarchy based on the "purity" of the Brahman priest and the "temporal power" of the dominant caste or the king.
Gloria Goodwin Raheja is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota and author of The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village (1988). Ann Grodzins Gold is Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. She is the author of Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims (California, 1988) and A Carnival of Parting: The Tales of King Bharthari and King Gopi Chand (California, 1992).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780226707297 |
| ISBN 10 | 0226707296 |
| Title | The Poison in the Gift |
| Author | Gloria Goodwin Raheja |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | The University of Chicago Press |
| Year published | 1988-09-15 |
| Number of pages | 300 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |