Product Description: These essays engage with themes and arguments from the oeuvre of Andre Béteille, ranging from changing patterns of stratification and policies of protective discrimination to the place of the individual in Indian history and threats to secularism.

For centuries, the Aghori have been known as the most radical ascetics in India: living naked on the cremation grounds, meditating on corpses, engaging in cannibalism and coprophagy, and consuming intoxicants out of human skulls. In recent years, however, they have shifted their practices from the embrace of ritually polluted substances to the healing of stigmatized diseases. In the process, they have become a large, socially mainstream, and politically powerful organization. Based on extensive fieldwork, this lucidly written book explores the dynamics of pollution, death, and healing in Aghor medicine. Ron Barrett examines a range of Aghor therapies from ritual bathing to modified Ayurveda and biomedicines and clarifies many misconceptions about this little-studied group and its highly unorthodox, powerful ideas about illness and healing.

Product Description: This study is a major addition to understanding the problems of social inequality and the nature of caste and kinship. A full account is given of the social structure of the region, emphasizing the continuity of principles, which govern relations between castes and relationships within castes...read more

Product Description: This volume addresses the relative absence of recent sociological research on the social processes and consequences of industrialization in India, as well as the growing disjunction between the traditional concerns of Indian sociology with caste, kinship and ritual representations and values, and the study of industrial labour...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This collection is concerned with the symbolic representation of money in a range of different societies, and more specifically with the moral evaluation of monetary and commercial exchanges. It focuses on the different cultural meanings surrounding monetary transactions, emphasizing the enormous cultural variation in the way money is symbolized and how this symbolism relates to culturally constructed notions of production, consumption, circulation, and exchange...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)