SOC 201 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Dharma, Social Science
Document Summary
What the word reflects, then, is the sense the explorers had that the boundaries between the subgroups in india were so very strong that it was as if the people in different castes belonged to different races. In 1908 c lestin bougl , a french social scientist, defined caste this way: The caste system divides the whole society into a large number of hereditary groups, distinguished from one another and connected together by three characteristics: Separation in matters of marriage and contact, whether direct or indirect; Division of labour, each group having, in theory or by tradition, a profession from which their members can depart only within certain limits; And finally hierarchy, which ranks the groups as relatively superior or inferior to one another. In a caste system, no one is allowed to wed, eat food cooked by, or drink from the cup of anyone from a lower caste.
