Ákos Östör

Concepts of person : kinship, caste, and marriage in India

Originally published as a hardback in 1982 by Harvard University Press, the Paperback edition has a new introduction which brings the reader up-to-date with new research done in these fields. Using rich ethnographic detail Concepts of Person looks at the extent to which new models of kinship, caste and marriage translate into regional and Indian Models. The contributors, all distinguished Scholars of South Asia, tackle different geographical areas and such diverse topics as hierarchy, forms of address, ritual, household and widowhood. Central to each chapter is a focus on the idea of the person in social relaitons. This book promises to play a central role in our future understanding of kinship, the possibilities for cross-cultural comparison, and ways of looking at social change.

Hierarchy Purified: Notes on Dumont and His Critics

The importance of Louis Dumonts work—both for specialists in Indian studies and for general social science theory—is by now obvious. Yet, since the publication of the initial volumes of Contributions to Indian Sociology (old series, coedited with D. Pocock), Dumonts work has been subjected to intensive criticisms that do not simply suggest he is wrong about a particular ethnographic fact, but rather that his approach is wrongheaded, that his starting points are idealist, biased (in favor of upper castes), or irretrievably tied to “French intellectual currents.”

Terms of address and Hungarian society

Abstract This essay examines the correlation between language use particularly pronouns and terms of address), social structure and change in Hungarian society. Data gathered from novels and novellas from the turn of the century and post-World War II periods in Hungary are analyzed and the structure underlying the actual usage of the terms of address and the dynamics of the addressing process are discussed. This is then compared with the Hungarian social and political structure in an attempt to establish correlations with the systems of address. The study reveals that changes in linguistic and social structuring — both within and between the respective eras — show a marked covariation.