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).
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