Practicing Caste
On Touching and not Touching

Aniket Jaaware (Author), Anupama Rao (Foreword by)

9780823282265

Hardback, published 4 December 2018

256 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.504 kg

Practicing Caste attempts a fundamental break from the tradition of caste studies, showing the limits of the historical, sociological, political, and moral categories through which it has usually been discussed. Engaging with the resources phenomenology, structuralism, and poststructuralism offer to our thinking of the body, Jaaware helps to illuminate the ethical relations that caste entails, especially around its injunctions concerning touching. The resulting insights offer new ways of thinking about sociality that are pertinent not only to India but also to thinking the common on a planetary basis.

Foreword by Anupama Rao vii
Introduction 1
1. Touch and Its Elements and Kinds 11
2. Touch—An A Priori Approach 37
3. Touch in Its Social and Historical Aspects I 61
4. Touch in Its Social and Historical Aspects II 93
5. Touch and Texts: Ancient and Modern 119
6. (Un)touchability of Things and People 148
7. Society, Sociality, Sociability 170
8. Recapitulation with Variations 190
Coda 205
Notes 209
Bibliography 223
Index 233