Homo hierarchicus
the trajectory of an anthropology’s classic
Keywords:
India, Castes, Social Sciences, Post-Colonialism, Subaltern StudiesAbstract
The article presents a critical review of a classical anthropological work from the 1960’s French academia. Instead of examining its impact on the Social Sciences practiced on the North, as it is usually done, it examines its reception among scholars and intellectuals from the South. The work Homo Hierarchicus – The Caste System and its impli-cations (1966), from the French anthropologist Louis Dumont was a heated topic of discussion among Indian social scientists for decades. It is aimed to discuss how the criticism this work has received over time derives not only from the changes on the paradigms and epistemology of the Social Sciences and from responses to social changes, but also how these trends are related to the development of the discipline in the Global South and the double hermeneutics between research and social reality in a global scale.
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