AMERICAN A N T H R 0 POLOGIST [86, 19841 210

description of the social formation and the rela- tions of production in the two villages in the middle of the 20th century, but it is difficult to relate these to the specifics of the economic ar- cheology connected with the Marxian. or a modified-Marxian, model of the Asiatic mode of production, As such, one has to make what one can of the theoretical insights as they stand on their own; they hardly seem to follow from, or illuminate, the concrete village surveys.

My last comment relates to the familiar issue of caste and class: in what ways does caste help or hinder political mobilization on class lines? Thanjavur is a particularly interesting labora- tory for a study of this question because land ownership, especially in its eastern part, is highly skewed with a high proportion of the agricultural work force consisting of agricul- tural labor, of whom again the scheduled castes form a very high proportion. We could have had a most useful contribution if Gough had been able to explore in 1950-80-a period in which changes in the forces of production have led to sizable output increases- the extent to which political activity has (or has not) been able to promote, or profit from, the weakening of caste and the strengthening of class con- sciousness. I t is therefore regrettable that the author has not been able to publish her re- surveys of 1976 along with her original surveys in a single volume.

Way of Life: King, Householder, Renouncer; Essays in Honour of Louis Dumont. T . N . Mudan, ed. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1982. 434 pp. n.p. (cloth).

Steve Barnett Planmetrics, Inc., New York

This book commemorates Louis Dumont’s seventieth birthday in 1981 through a collection of essays supposedly linked by following through Dumont’s notion of the “good life” as defined Brahmanically. As in most edited volumes of this sort, the various authors are quite free in the manner in which they actually tie their papers to Dumont’s ideas. Tenuous links not- withstanding, this is an important book for an- thropologists of India because of the quality of most papers and because of the central motifs in recent Indian anthropological theory addressed by many authors.

I focus this review on those papers of direct

interest to anthropologists of India. F. A. Marglin has written a compelling study of tem- ple Devadasis in Puri, Orissa. She sees structural similarities between King and Brahman, and wife and husband, Marglin develops a complex analysis of actual temple ritual, textual allu- sions, and symbolic oppositions to explore the meaning of Devadasi identity as both dangerous and auspicious. She offers the important con- trast, auspicious/inauspicious, as a complement to purityhmpurity, and suggests that this situates Devadasi identity and provides the form of Devadasi link to hierarchy. Dumont’s separa- tion, and encompassment, of kingly power from Brahmanical status is importantly underscored by Marglin.

Madan continues to report on his long and highly productive research among the Kashmiri Pandits. This paper is an instance of a larger tendency in contemporary Indian anthropology to locate some of Dumont’s basic insights in everyday life as it is lived by ordinary caste members, and to focus on the cultural construc- tion of caste, family, and person as reflected in life cycle events such as marriage, birth, and death. Madan’s clearly presented paper com- plements similar efforts in other parts of India. Recently and curiously however, Dumont has rejected some of these attempts to ground abstract hypotheses in concrete data, so Madan’s excellent summary raises complex issues in the anthropology of India that are not directly discussed in this volume.

T. Selwin tackles a difficult subject, the rela- tion of dharma to adharma, in a central Indian village in Madhya Pradesh. He provides in- teresting data on villagers’ attitudes to the more unorthodox Gonds, concepts of sickness and death, and conceptualizations of three festivals centering around Holi. Selwin sees adha-ma as a necessary corollary to dharma and raises sug- gestive conjectures about the relation of Holi to the festivals of Nava-ratri and Rama-navmi.

R. Nicholas continues his preoccupation with concepts of the body as organizing symbols, and here extends his research to shruddu concep- tions and observances in Bengal, although he claims all-India significance for many of his concepts. J. P. Parry has produced a mundane piece on Hindu theological concepts of Varanasi, both as a sacred place and as a special location where death provides automatic “liberation” from rebirth. Parry discusses some implications and contradictions implicit in such liberation, but does not reach any compelling conclusions and does not cite Dumont.

CULTURAL/ETHNOLOGY 211

A strange paper by D. Pocock, a descriptive account of the occupational range within a small Brahman caste in Saurashtra, focuses on occupational change away from attendance on pilgrims at the sacred complex of Dvaraka. Pocock discusses alternate occupations to pil- grim attendance in great detail, and, unfortu- nately, I agree with his own characterization of this laundry list as “a rather dull catalog” (p. 334). He uses this occupational variation to leap to vast conclusions about the relevance of caste for understanding Indian life and the relative significance of artha and dharma. In an arcane way, these conjectures are counter-Dumont, but the data are too local, and Pococknever directly joins the argument.

A. Mayer has written an amusing piece about a perky despot, the Maharaja of Kolhapur. While it is interesting to see the Maharaja’s specific blending of British and Indian styles and ideology, Mayer cannot, despite a forced attempt, tie the Maharaja’s view to Dumont’s theories.

In addition to these directly anthropological papers, this volume includes important Indolog- ical studies of interest to anthropologists. “The Salvation of the King in the Mahabharata” by M. Biardeau is a major piece offering essential insights into that text. She brilliantly foregrounds the kingly position of Arjuna (as Krishna’s true bhakta) versus more traditional interpretations stressing Yudhisthira. C. Malamoud offers a powerful reading of Purusartha that points up the consistency of a stable hierarchy of values over time. R. Inden discusses relations among early medieval Indian kings to argue that a consistent hierarchy of levels of kings emerges. Much of his supportive data come from a temple and court complex for a “king of kings,” and its builder, in Gujarat.

S. Tambiah extends Dumont’s emphasis on the position of the renouncer to early Buddhist and Jain monastic orders, focusing on dif- ferences between Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain concepts of renunciation, and on the Hindu ability to include and fit new components in the hierarchy.

Other articles include a reading of the Ar- thasastra (K. J. Shah), an analysis of the story of Rama (V. Das), the theory of Brahmacarya (R. Gandhi), an important analysis of householder and wanderer u. C. Heesterman), and a description of householder and renouncer in Brahmanical Hinduism and in Buddhism (R. Thapar).

The most disappointing part of this volume is

the two introductory pieces by J-C. Galey. The first paper purports to outline Dumont’s major positions; unfortunately, it uses an inap- propriate metaphor, Dumont’s characterization of himself as an “artisan,” to delineate Dumont’s intellectual development. The metaphor obscures Dumont’s actual relation to the development of Indian thought and Du- mont’s own relations with his colleagues. Galey tries to do too much with Dumont’s concepts, making them over into a basic guide for understanding Western values in general, and so falls into banalities about totalitarianism in general (p. 9). Galey’s interview with Dumont suffers from a similar problem: he does not ask critical or probing questions, and thus the reason for an interview format is lost. While Du- mont’s interview ruminations are informative, Galey loses a chance to discuss important theoretical problems with Dumont.

Madan ends the volume with an essay, “For a Sociology of India,” that situates Dumont’s work in the development of Indian studies and finds more links in the various papers to one or another of Dumont’s positions than does this reviewer.

Sohar: Culture and Society i n an Omani Town. Fredrzk Barth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. vii + 264 pp. $24.50 (cloth).

Sidney R. Waldron State University of New York, Cortland

Sohar is a major extension of Fredrik Barth’s generative theory of behavior and society to a complex urban milieu. Sohar is a Muslim town of some ten thousand in Oman, on the eastern coast of the Arabian peninsula. As a trading and transshipment center, its roots are ancient, deriving from the monsoon routes that con- nected it to eastern Africa on one side and the Persian Gulf and India on the other.

As those who are familiar with Barth’s work, and who have read the recent critical evalua- tions of it in Paine’s and Prattis’s recent review articles (Man 1983; A A 1983) might expect, Sohar is as much an analytic exercise as it is an ethnography. Parts 1 and 2, approximately the first third of the book, are basically descriptive of the community and its pluralistic attributes. Part 3 delves into the enaction of individual behavior in the context of households, net- works, and the marketplace, while shifting to a