Caste Overview - Concepedia

Principles

Definition

Caste is a complex socio-cultural phenomenon and a key concept across various academic disciplines, investigating systems of social stratification characterized by hereditary membership, strict endogamy, hierarchical ordering, and ascribed status, examining their historical origins, structural maintenance, and enduring effects on social relations, power, and inequality.

Ontological type

Theoretical Frameworks

Historical Development

Comparative Systems

Key developments

Key Figures

Structural Caste Paradigm era

Louis Dumont [1] emerges as a central figure in this era, affiliated with major centers such as University of Chicago [3] and University of Hawaii System [4] during the structural caste scholarship of 1956–1987. His key contribution, most notably through Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications [7], mapped caste as a durable structural order that organizes hierarchy and mobility, and articulated why ritual status translates into socioeconomic position, shaping the field's understanding of caste in this era. Gerald D. Berreman [2] is likewise a key author in this era, associated with University of California, Berkeley [5] and Cornell University [6]. His contribution, anchored by Homo Hierarchicus [7], helped ground field driven ethnography and cross cultural comparison in caste analysis, reinforcing caste as a persistent mechanism of stratification in this era.

Caste and State Power era

In the 1988–2001 period, caste is treated as a political technology shaping power, property, and governance, with Christophe Jaffrelot showing how lower-caste mobilization and reservations reconfigured North Indian electoral politics and access to state resources. Paul Brass analyzes how caste-based blocs pervade party systems and elections, translating caste identities into organized political leverage and formal inclusion or exclusion. Sukhadeo Thorat provides empirical work on caste, education, and reservations, illustrating how state policy redistributed opportunities and reinforced hierarchies within public institutions. Postcolonial critique by Subaltern Studies figures such as Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty reveals how colonial and postcolonial administrative knowledge produced categorical classifications that enabled social control and state-mediated identity politics.

Institutional Embedding of Caste era

Kumarasamy Thangaraj [1] is affiliated with Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai [3] and University College London [4] in this era. His key contributions through the 2009 paper Reconstructing Indian population history [7] involve reconstructing Indian population history with genetic data to reveal regional structure and demographic processes that underlie caste-associated social stratification and mobility, highlighting the period's governance and market implications. David Reich [2] is affiliated with Harvard University [5] and Massachusetts Institute of Technology [6] in this era. His key contributions from the same study [7] advanced population-genetic methods to reconstruct Indian population history and quantify admixture, enabling more precise inferences about how caste-linked diversity interfaces with modern governance and market design.