Homo Hierarchicus - The Caste System and Its Implications
by Louis Dumont

(ISBN:019564547-2 ~ Pub Year: 2002 ~ Pages:490 ~ Binding: Paperback ~ Publisher: Oxford)

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This book is a major contribution to the general sociological theory of Indian caste. Indeed within that specialized field, it is probably the most important work. This English edition includes a lengthy Preface in which Dumont reviews the academic discussion inspired by this book and answers his critics.

Louis Dumont’s modern classic, here presented in an enlarged, revised, and corrected second edition, simultaneously supplies the reader with the most cogent statement on the Indian caste system and its organizing principles and a provocative advance in the comparison of societies on the basis of their underlying ideologies. Dumont moves gracefully from ethnographic data to the hierarchical ideology enshrined in ancient religious texts, revealed as the governing conception of the contemporary caste structure. On yet another plane of analysis, ‘homo hierarchicus is contrasted with his modern Western antithesis, ‘homo aequalis.’

This edition includes a lengthy Preface in which Dumont reviews the academic discussion inspired by ‘Homo Hierarchicus and answers his critics. A new Postface which sketches the theoretical and comparative aspects of the concept of hierarchy, and three significant Appendices previously omitted from the English translation complete this innovative and influential work.

EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS:

‘This book is a major contribution to the general sociological theory of Indian caste. Indeed within that specialized field, it is probably the most important work ever published.’
-Edmund Leach, ‘South Asia Review’

‘A profound contribution to Indian studies, by virtue alone of its encompassing attempt to fit a number of classical and contemporary works into a consistent scheme.’
-S.J. Tambiah, ‘American Anthropologist


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