Caste

About: Caste is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5681 publications have been published within this topic receiving 91330 citations. The topic is also known as: caste system.

The Indian Caste System as a Means of Contract Enforcement

Abstract: The caste system in India has been dated to approximately 1000 B.C. and still aff ects the lives of a billion people in South Asia. The persistence of this system of social stratification for 3000 years of changing economic and social environments is puzzling. This paper formalizes a model of the caste system to better understand the institution and the reasons for its persistence. It argues that the caste system provided a tool for contract enforcement and facilitated trade in services, giving an economic reason for its persistence. A caste is modeled as an information-sharing institution, which enforces collective action. Trade is modeled as a version of the one-sided prisoner’s dilemma game, where the consumer has an opportunity to default. Consumers who default on a member of a caste are punished by denying them services produced in the caste. Various features of the caste system like occupational specialization by caste, a purity scale, and a hierarchy of castes are shown to be equilibrium outcomes that improve the efficiency of contract enforcement. The implications of the model are tested empirically using unique census data from Cochin (1875), Tirunelveli (1823) and Mysore (1941).

Caste Networks in the Modern Indian Economy

Abstract: Social networks support diverse economic activities in developing countries, using the information and the social sanctions at their disposal to sustain cooperation and to solve market imperfections. In India, the natural unit around which networks would be organized is the endogamous (sub) caste or jati. Caste networks have, indeed, historically supported, and continue to support economic activity and mobility. While this provides a novel economic explanation for the persistence of caste in modern India, a balanced assessment of the contribution of these networks to growth and the macro economy must also account for the static and dynamic inefficiencies that they generate.

‘Man can’t give birth, woman can't fish’: gender dynamics in the small-scale fisheries of Bangladesh

Abstract: Going beyond the myths prevalent in the socio-cultural embeddedness of rural Bangladesh, this article examines the diverse visible and invisible roles of fisherwomen in small-scale fisheries. This research considered two ethnic groups situated in two different ecosystems: the floodplain freshwater ecosystem is represented by new-entrant Muslim fishers ‘Maimal’ and the coastal ecosystem is represented by caste-based Hindu fishers ‘Jaladas’. From the basic ontological worldview of human dignity, moral individualism, and the social recognition of women’s rights, we argue that fisherwomen’s roles need to be recognized, focused, and valued to develop a horizontal understanding that is a prerequisite to the process of democratization, and the proper functioning of a just society. In the rural societies, a host of attributes, such as the deep-rooted socio-cultural constructions of the motherly myth, extreme tolerance, family teaching, religious antagonism, poverty, lack of education, internalization of a subordi...

Cárdenas and the Caste war that Wasn't: State power and Indigenismo in post-Revolutionary Yucatán

Abstract: The Caste War that devastated Yucatan in the middle of the nineteenth century cast a long shadow across ethnic relations and politics in the state decades after its effective end. During the Mexican Revolution and the subsequent period of national reconstruction, revolutionary politicians invoked the Caste War as a precursor to the Revolution and as justification for post-Revolutionary projects, in particular indigenismo. The state’s indigenist policy advocated, in the words of Alan Knight, the “emancipation and integration of Mexico’s exploited Indian groups.” To this end, it offered indigenous people education, legal support, even land; however, these “modernizing” policies also destroyed or appropriated much of their culture and subordinated them to the state. The legacy of the Caste War shaped such indigenist projects in Yucatan from the Revolution to (at least) the 1930s, but its influence was strongest during Cardenas’ visit to Yucatan in August of 1937. The president not only reinterpreted the Caste War to justify land reform and a broad indigenist project; he attempted to mobilize the Yucatecan peasantry along class and ethnic lines and threatened recalcitrant landlords with another caste war should they oppose him. Once armed, however, peasant soldiers turned their rifles not against the landowners but against each other. This essays explores how the Caste War’s legacy shaped the development and deployment of indigenist projects in Yucatan from the Revolution to the late 1930s, focusing on Cardenas’ aborted mobilization. Along the way, it will consider the impact and efficacy of state-sponsored indigenismo. Above all, it seeks to understand why state efforts to champion the cause of the Maya failed to unify the rural poor of Yucatan under the banner of Cardenismo.