| The Remembered Village | |
| Author: | M. N. Srinivas |
| Language: | English |
| Series: | Oxford India Perennials |
| Subject: | Ethnography |
| Publisher: | Oxford, Oxford University Press |
| Pub Date: | 1978 |
| Media Type: | |
| Pages: | 356 |
| Isbn: | 0783746830 |
The Remembered Village is a 1978 ethnological work by M. N. Srinivas. The book is about the villager who lives in the small village, named as Rampura in the state of Karnataka, then called Mysore. It is notable for the absence of fieldnotes as a base for the work, which is considered standard in ethnography following the standards set by Bronislaw Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western Pacific as they were lost due to arson,[1] and elicited fierce debate in the anthropological community due to its unorthodox origin, among other factors.[2] [3] [4] The book is noted for its concern on the aesthetic, flowing prose and the significant role of the ethnographer himself,[5] a marked departure from earlier works such as Evans-Pritchard's studies on the Nuer, which is written with a more objective voice.
The caste system in India has long been the subject of scholarly interest, but there was a distinct lack of ethnographic material on it as noted by Radcliffe-Brown.[6] Inspired by this and other works such as that of Robert Redfield and Fei Hsiao-Tung, M.N. Srinivas set out to a remote part of India to carry out fieldwork as part of the position he was offered by his teacher, Evans-Pritchard and ended up choosing Rampura due to his fluency in Kannada and several emotional factors, including his ties to Mysore and being awed by the local view.[7]
The book consists of eleven chapters. General summaries of each chapter are included below.
See main article: article and Sanskritisation.
The all-India varna and the local jati, based on land ownership, often are not strictly the same, with Brahmins and Lingayats higher in the caste order often being clients lower in the Varna order. The disparity in rank between the economic status and the ritual status could result in high jati classes moving up the varna hierarchy by adopting practices of higher castes.[9]
The concept of dominant caste in the book, where the peasant caste has much practical power, including influential members such as the headman, his lineage and the God's house lineage, could be related to their large numbers viv-à-vis the smaller numbers of the Brahmins, and could be used to explain other social phenomena, such as prestige among English trade unions.[10]
David Francis Pocock criticized Srinivas for putting excessive sociological jargon for his supposed audience,"the educated layman" and yet not sufficient to justify it as scholarly work, and also noted on the question of subjectivity.[11] Another common form of criticism relates to the shortcomings of structural-functionalism, the basis of the work as taught by Evans-Pritchard in the vein of Durkheim.[12]