Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: ...

attachments, so that the value of engaging with meanings of the village cannot be overstated.

Caste Identities

The extent to which caste marks an unchanging sociological reality or transforms in accordance with wider historical currents is one of the central issues in debates over identity in India, and this debate has been usually sited in rural India. The emergence of caste as a predominant analytical category in approaches to India is usually traced to the works of Dumont (1971, 1980). Aiming to arrive at the general features of caste in order to represent its unique role within India, as well as to utilize caste to demonstrate the essential unity of India, Dumont's argument was that caste is organized around the principle of hierarchy. For Dumont, hierarchical ordering was seen in the attachment of notions of purity and pollution to particular castes, and in the ways in which caste practices changed on the basis of a borrowing by lower castes of the symbolic and material practices of higher castes. In all instances, he argued, the dominance of the priestly caste (the Brahman) was maintained. In the process, politics, which also encompassed the sphere of the economic within it, was subordinate to religion within India. In fact, Dumont (1980, 164–166) traced the very possibility of economic activity to the advent of the British and to challenges to the Hindu religion (by Jainism, for instance). According to Dumont (1980, 157), even landownership displayed the significance of caste hierarchy, since

For Dumont, the certainty of the caste hierarchy provided a contrast with the uncertain nature of economic and political power in India.

Among the most trenchant criticisms of Dumont's formulations are those provided by Appadurai (1988) who argued that caste, especially when assumed a priori as the most significant aspect of an analysis of