To Be Cared For Book Forum: a response from the author

Abstract

A response from the author to the views expressed by Harriss, Haynes, Loomba and Mosse in their reviews of To Be Cared For

Keywords:

• caste and untouchability
• religious conversion
• gender
• power
• ethnographic methodology

Notes

1 The anthropologists Gerald Berreman, Owen Lynch, and R.S. Khare are important exceptions.

2 Oscar Lewis himself recognized the external sources of the urban poor’s suffering under capitalism, and saw socialism as the only realistic way out. And yet he also insisted that the poor were ‘psychologically unready’ to take advantage of opportunities to improve their position, should such opportunities arise (1966, 21). The culture of poverty theorizing that grew out of Lewis’s work largely ignored his comments about external causation, but not the pathologizing.

3 The Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, which Harriss mentions, is an Ambedkarite party.

4 Harriss notes Tamil Nadu’s relatively good record of providing social welfare, when compared to other Indian states. But I think he will agree that that is a very low standard indeed, and that the principal achievements of Dravidian rule have been in politically and economically strengthening so-called OBC castes, which the people of Anbu Nagar count as their oppressors. Rather than asking why some Dalits do not support Ambedkarite parties, we should ask why India's Ambedkarites have yet to find politically significant allies among ‘touchable’ Indians (including the liberal intelligentsia).

5 It is well known that subordinated people sometimes speak in the voice of the dominant ideology even when they otherwise oppose it. But ‘untouchable consent’ theorists put great stock in even isolated and decontextualized statements by individual Dalits in support of hierarchy, without disclosing information about the power dynamics of situations in which such statements were recorded, for example by noting whether members of the dominant society where present, and without attempting to account for the anthropologist’s own presence, as I have done in To be cared for. A closely related approach in the consent literature is to treat data suggestive of consent as providing a window into the consciousness of a prior age, whereas evidence of the opposite is interpreted as departure from the historical norm. Yet both sorts of data come from the same synchronic slice; the procedure by which they are sorted as ‘holdovers from a bygone age’ or ‘recent developments’ is given in advance by the very theory these data, once sorted, are offered as supporting evidence for (Roberts 2015). Finally, there is Moffatt’s influential theory of structural replication (1979), according to which untouchables are said to spontaneously reproduce hierarchy among themselves without any prompting from the dominant caste community, thus supposedly proving they accept hierarchy as a moral ideal. Moffatt’s own data, however, reveal that untouchables did not spontaneously replicate the caste order among themselves, as his thesis requires, but were materially rewarded by the dominant community for doing so.