Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching
Aniket Jaaware
Abstract
This book attempts a fundamental break from the tradition of caste studies, using a version of phenomenology, structuralism, and post-structuralism to give a radical description of touchability and untouchability in terms of a rhetoric and semantics of touch. Written in minimalist style, it attempts to see if regulations on touchability can be seen as generalizable, and not seen merely as an Indian phenomenon. It also argues that, upon examination, several traditional sociological, political, and moral categories do not prove to be useful for understanding touchability and untouchability.
Keywords: caste studies, dalit studies, semantics, touch, touchability, untouchability
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 | Print ISBN-13: 9780823282265 |
| Published to Fordham Scholarship Online: September 2019 | DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823282265.001.0001 |
