Lina Fruzzetti

The gift of a virgin : women, marriage, and ritual in a Bengali society

In this study, anthropologist Lina Fruzzetti paints a picture of the activities and rituals governing the life in Vishnupur, a large town in rural West Bengal. Drawing on four years of fieldwork during which she was both an observer and a participant in many of the rituals she describes, the author gives primary attention to women, their daily activities and their marriage rituals. These, she believes, are an important key to the understanding of Indian society as a whole.

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.”