Death is the most potent of all the sources of impurity and inauspiciousness in the life of a Hindu. This paper explores the different discourses on the nature of untouchability in Gujarat in order to delineate the relationship between the collective, permanent pollution of the lowest castes in the caste hierarchy, the so-called ‘Untouchables’, and their occupational specialization involving the disposal of dead animals and human corpses. It also analyses the inter-caste exchange of food and services at two levels: that between each of the untouchable castes and the other castes of a village, and that among the different untouchable castes themselves. The intra-caste sphere of temporary death pollution (sutak) incurred by individuals affected by the death of kin or affines is not dealt with here.

This is a paper on the question of values of the East and the West. I might need to explain a little in the beginning as to where exactly I should try to draw this line, dividing the East from the West. Is the line to be drawn at the Suez Canal, following the English who, at the height of their colonial rule, often talked about this big cultural divide with the expression ‘East of Suez’? I have set this problem in a Nepali milieu or context in which it is my wish to raise a few points regarding the value crisis we have come to create for ourselves. Our present situation makes it difficult for us to chart a lonely course in isolation from the world. The West has been our trendsetter in everything and, whether we like it or not, we find ourselves constantly faced with the prospect of absorbing Western values at an ever-increasing rate.

In the history of democracy, various criteria have been used to determine the size and nature of the electorate. We can, in a general way, divide these criteria into two types which we might label ascribed versus achieved characteristics of the person. Suffrage qualifications based upon age, sex, race and religion would fall under the first category; qualifications determined by education, military and criminal status, and property fall under the second. The distinction draws attention to the implicit notion that some characteristics are acquired by individual choice (‘achieved’) while others are given from the outside simply by nature of an automatic inclusion within certain groups (‘ascribed’). Such a categorization is certainly open to challenge from many angles. The point however is that it provides us with one way to begin understanding the changes which democracy has undergone. Of the ascribed qualities only age remains a legitimate basis for denying suffrage. Variations in suffrage rights based on achieved qualities still exist though there is less reliance on any of these as well. Overall, the development path seems to have run from the use of both types to the use of achieved criteria to using only age as a prerequisite. What are the driving forces of this transformation?

Le frisson que, fort de ses traditions chrétiennes et utilitaristes, un Français du xxe siècle ne manque pas d'éprouver devant chaque avatar de l'islam mondial n'est pas son seul fait. Ne voit-on pas déjà, vers 1867, un bouddhologue russe (V. P. Vasil'ev, 1818–1900) tenter d'attirer l'attention du monde chrétien sur le péril d'engloutissement dont il voyait menacé celui-ci par une Chine prête à sombrer, croyait-il, dans l'islamisme ? À l'époque où rien ne semblait arrêter l'expansion triomphante de l'empire russe à travers une Asie centrale endormie (Tashkent est conquis en 1865, Bukhara et Khiva en 1873), les grands soulèvements musulmans de l'Ouest chinois — au Kansu, dans l'actuel Ninghsia, au Yünnan — paraissaient, eux, lancés pour propager leur incendie d'une communauté musulmane à l'autre, jusqu'aux extrémités de l'empire chinois et au-delà. Les prédictions du savant russe se sont finalement avérées, dix ans plus tard, fausses de bout en bout. Noyé dans des flots de sang, l'islam cessait, à partir de 1876, d'être un problème pour le trône des Ch'ing [Qing]; et la Chine impériale, ainsi que la Chine républicaine qui allait suivre, était bien incapable de déferler sur le monde chrétien.

Moderne Gesellschaften produzieren auf vielen Ebenen — in der Wissenschaft, in der Politik, in der Kunst, im »Alltag« — unablässig Beschreibungen ihrer Strukturen und Elemente und versuchen, Ursprung und Richtung ihrer Wandlungen abzuschätzen. Trotz der Ausdifferenzierung eines eigenen »Beobachtungssystems« in Form der institutionalisierten Sozialwissenschaften und trotz der methodischen Kompetenz, die dort mittlerweile angesammelt wurde, ist jedoch angesichts der hohen Komplexität dieser Gesellschaften nicht zu erwarten, daß diese »Selbstbeschreibungen« jemals vollständig oder abgeschlossen sein werden. Ebenso unwahrscheinlich ist es, daß Beschreibungen, die aus dem Blickwinkel unterschiedlicher Beobachter — darunter verstehe ich z.B. gesellschaftliche Subsysteme wie »Politik«, »Ökonomie« oder »Wissenschaft«, aber auch kollektive Akteure, Gruppen und Individuen — angefertigt werden, übereinstimmen. Und dies gilt in gesteigertem Maße für jene Beschreibungen, die mit sozialer Ungleichheit einen normativ in besonderem Maße »aufgeladenen« Bereich zum Thema haben.

The image of the Ayatollah Khomeini is inextricably bound up with the popular conception of Islam today. This view of Islam as a religion of fanaticism and violence ignores the existence of a powerful mystical strand in the form of Sufism in which a philosophy of love is central. Between 1980 and 1981, as part of my doctoral research, I spent six months in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, living with the pupils of a Sufi sheik. This group had millenarian beliefs which acted, not as a means of violent insurrection, but rather as a means of reconciling the contradictory and often violent forces to which they were subjected.

Depuis des années, qu'anthropologue, nous travaillons sur la société hindoue dans l'État du Karnataka, leurs silhouettes nous étaient devenues peu à peu familières. Combien de fois, au petit matin ou à la nuit tombante, avons-nous rencontré leurs ombres déformées, courbées par l'énorme charge qu'ils transportent à pas lents et mesurés jusqu'aux rues commerçantes de la ville de Dharwar. Là, ils installent quotidiennement leurs étals précaires pour proposer aux Indiens des lainages : pull-overs, châles, bonnets, gants. Ils sont spécialisés dans la vente de vêtements qui sont autant de témoignages de leur terre d'origine, comme s'ils étaient encore porteurs d'une mémoire climatique presque totalement étrangère à leur environnement actuel.

This paper examines some of the moral meanings of aids, and argues that in addition to understanding aids in the context of the sexual counter-revolution, it also needs to be placed in the wider context of global economic and ideological crises, and the ‘New Right's’ struggle for hegemony. Denis Altman refers to aids as ‘the most political of diseases’ (Altman 1986, p. 11). A few years ago, Evans Stark pointed out that all epidemics are ‘social events’, even though they may appear as natural, random phenomena. This is because they have become the focus of struggles for control over resources (principally housing, medicines, and sanitation) (Stark 1977). Epidemics further tend to throw into relief deeply held social tensions and anxieties, which can become triggers for social reorganisation around traditional values. It is not difficult to see how this is the case with aids, which is infused in particular with tensions over sexuality and desire. In relation to this it is important to emphasize first, that sexual contact is estimated to be responsible for around two-thirds of reported aids cases amongst adults in the U.S.A. (Gracie et al. 1986), but it is not actually an exclusively sexually transmitted disease; and secondly that compared with other major causes of morbidity and mortality, aids remains a relatively rare condition in many parts of the world. It is sociologically significant though, that the two major routes of transmission, IV use and penetrative sexual intercourse, involve issues of control over body boundaries.

La question de l'intégration des immigrants se pose en général par rapport à leur devenir, comme mobilité ascendante ou descendante dans les translations possibles des positions sociales dans la société d'accueil, compte tenu de leur propre capital culturel et social et des inégalités culturelles existantes dans cette société d'accueil, ainsi que de la conjoncture politique, économique et sociale qui y a cours. L'immigration récente des Falachas (juifs d'Éthiopie) en Israël a ceci de paradoxal qu'elle a, au départ, suscité un questionnement portant au moins autant sur le passé de cette population que sur son futur destin social, à partir d'hypothèses souvent invérifiables ou, plutôt, indécidables, quant aux contradictions possibles qu'elles impliquent en ce qui concerne l'identité des juifs d'Éthiopie, et dont l'objet est cette zone en amont même du passé, et qu'il conviendrait d'appeler la mythologie de l'origine des Falachas.

It is not peculiar to modern society that ideals of friendship express some of the ‘noblest’ potentials of human association. But an ideal of friendship so contrary to the forms of association that dominate the larger society is distinctive to our times. Explicit contract, rational exchange, formal division of labor, and impersonal institutions define the Great Society; by inversion, they also define those ideals constituting friendship understood at its morally best. Especially in the urban core of Western society, particularly its more educated sectors, friendships are judged of high quality to the extent that they invert the ways of the larger society. In this ideal, friendships are voluntary, unspecialized, informal and private. They are grounded in open-ended commitments without explicit provision for their termination—unlike contractual relations, prior stipulation of the conditions that legitimately end a friendship cannot be constitutive of friendship. In such an ideal, friendships are diminished in moral quality if terms of exchange between friends are consciously or scrupulously monitored, for this implies that utilities derived from friendships are constitutive, as in market relations, rather than valued as expressions of personal intentions and commitments.