Culture And Reality : Essays on The Hindu System of Managing Foods

$19
Item Code: IDH087
Publisher: Indian Institute Of Advanced Study, Shimla
Author: R.S. Khare
Language: English
Pages: 210
Cover: Hardcover
Other Details 8.7" X 5.7"
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Book Description
About the Book

A collection of six original essays, and a Prolegomena from the author of The Hindu Hearth and Home (Vikas: 1976) to complement his social anthropological discussion of Hindu foods. As R.S. Khare remarks in Prolegomena, these essays are "open-ended and suggestive [they] strike out in several directions to study a group of cultural features of Hindu foods either for symbolic and ideological points they bring out or as they direct our attention to the relationship between ideology and practice".

Discussing for the first time several conceptual issues that Indian social anthropology now points towards, the author is concerned with two sets of interrelated features, a logic of Hindu culinary relations and a set of implications flowing from the underlying cultural ideology. The first three chapters are primarily concerned with a logic of culinary relations, while the last three are devoted to cultural meanings and ideological conceptions of foods. Juxtaposing ideology against reality, some of those basic issues of the "food problem" are discussed that should concern Indian social scientists, planners, administrators, and agricultural experts.

The book as a whole offers a constructive critique of the caste anthropology. While it does not totally reject the gains made by this approach, it does not stop there. It shows the necessity of approaching a systemic logic and its meanings if Indian problems are to be handled in their own terms.

About the Author

R.S. Khare is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.A. He has taught at Kanya-Kubja [Jai Narain Misra] College, Lucknow, University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, and Ecople Pratique Des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, Paris. He was a faculty fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies, and a Guest Fellow of Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, and a member of Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton. He is author of The Changing Brahmins (Chicago: 1970), The Hindu Hearth and Home (Vikas: 1976), and editor of Environmental Quality and Social Responsibility (Wisconsin: 19720).

CONTENTS
CHAPTER 2
PROLEGOMENAVII
CHAPTER 1
FOLK CATEGORIES OF HINDU FOODS1-27
The cooked and uncooked: meanings and categories 1 General lexical units and contexts 3 Syntactic and semantic domains 5 Folk "taxonomy" of cooking 10 Cooking without fire: concept, contexts, and meanings 12 Cooking with fire: the Kacca and pakka Variations 17 Kacca and Pakka dichotomy: ranking and scope 24 implication 26.
THE PARADIGMATIC STRUCTURE OF A HINDU FOOD CYCLE28-45
Purpose and approach 28 The structure: constituents cycles, and events of circulation 36 Determination of meaning 43 Implication 44.
CHAPTER 3
FOOD CYCLES: COMPARATIVE PARADIGMATIC RELATIONS AND THE CULTURAL INEOLOGY 46-80
constituent units of food cycles; a comparison 47 Constituent (B)-Cook (1) Halwai, (2) Bride's maiden cooking 47 Constituent (C)-Utensils Gift utensils 53 Constituent (D)-Cooking techniques 62 Constituents (E), (F), and (G)-Cooking ingredients, food types and overall meaning categories 66 (E)-Feasts and festivals 68 (F)-Fasts and festivals 69 Some general ideological charaeteristics 74
CHAPTER 4
SOME SPECIALIZED CULTURAL PROPERTIES OF FOODS
Hot and cold: an Ayurvedic distinction 82 Right/left and east/south 86 supernatural "eaters" and their forces 92 Deity's left-overs (Prasad), scraps (jutha) and excreta (gu) 98 Symbolic non-foods and substitute foods 110 Concluding remarks 111.
CHAPTER 5
PERENNIAL FOOD: AN IDEOLOGICAL CONCEPTION114-141
Social Integuments of moral food 123 " Perennial food": a product of Hindu ideology 131 A synthetic model 134 Implications 139
CHAPTER 6
IDEOLOGY AND REALITY: TOWARDS A CULTURAL GENESIS OF THE "FOOD PROBLEM" 142-173
Natural of the problem 142 Food production: a dynamic between work ethic and daiva 145 Distribution and consumption: the domains of papa and punya 155 Myth and reality: abundance and scarcity 164 Implications 171.
Appendix174
References199
Index204

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