The work of the anthropologist Louis Dumont, who would have been 100 years old on 1er August 2011, continues to be discussed. Last example, the criticisms addressed to him by the American anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran in a book which reviews the use in the social sciences of the notions of culture, race and caste
Kamala Visweswaran’s articles collected in this book deal with the same question: how are racialist ideologies, totally disqualified for both political and scientific reasons in the aftermath of the Second World War, rearticulated at the beginning of this XXIe century under the notion of so-called incommensurable cultural differences (uncommon) between Western societies and the rest of the world ? Anthropology is at the center of these debates because this discipline, since the pioneering work of Franz Boas, has adopted the description of differences in the name of a cultural relativism which was then intended to be an antidote to racism. But today, the author writes, “ the notion of culture has replaced that of race as a form of negative ideology “.
To understand this shift, Kamala Visweswaran questions the history of anthropology by focusing on the circulation and modes of operation of these notions in works that have marked the discipline. She develops her analysis in three areas, gender, caste and the question “ Negro », and pays special attention to studies on India. Indeed, these last two themes are the subject of an article by Louis Dumont “ Caste, racism and stratification », published in 1960, which Kamala Visweswaran places in the history of black American sociology and that of Indian sociology. It is mainly these developments (chapters 2 to 5) that we present here.
Are there castes elsewhere than in India ?
Louis Dumont’s article is of interest to general sociology in its comparative aim. The question is whether caste, as a trait of social morphology, is specific to the Indian world or whether there are castes outside India. Number of American sociologists, presented under the name of “ Caste school of race relations “, argued that blacks formed a sort of caste in North American society, according to the principle of “ color bar » characterized by endogamy, spatial segregation, specialization of occupations and the racialist hierarchy between whites and blacks.
Dumont addresses a main criticism to these authors. They select a few morphological traits of the caste which they transpose to American society, ignoring that we cannot isolate these elements from the system which gives them meaning. Certain aspects of caste can be compared with the relations between whites and blacks in the United States, but we cannot speak of castes in the sense of the caste system of India.
On the other hand, Dumont maintains, hierarchy theory makes sense of a sociological feature of race relations in the United States. His remarks consist of three points. First of all, “ racist discrimination succeeded black slavery once it was abolished “. Second, “ the distinction between master and slave was followed by the discrimination of whites against blacks “. Finally, thirdly, “ the essence of the distinction (between master and slave) was legal. By suppressing it, we favored the transformation of its racial attribute into a racist substance “. And Dumont clarified: “ (…) racism responds, in a new form, to an old function. Everything happens as if it represented, in the egalitarian society, a resurgence of what was expressed differently, more directly and naturally, in the old hierarchical society. Make the distinction illegitimate, and you have discrimination, remove the old modes of distinction and you have racist ideology » (ibid.).
The statement seemed ambiguous to more than one reader, and twenty years later Dumont had to clarify it: “ I am in no way saying, as some have seemed to believe, that hierarchy is better than equality, or in this case that slavery – which is not a purely hierarchical affair – is better than racism. “.
It remains that Dumont’s three propositions are questionable both historically and sociologically. First, racism takes historically variable forms and it cannot be reduced to a “ modern phenomenon “. Then, in the United States, the opposition between whites and blacks existed before the abolition of slavery. Finally, the legal character of the master-slave relationship is in no way “ the essence of the system “. As Kamala Visweswaran points out, the slave system is underpinned by a racialist ideology, and the black-white hierarchical distinction is consubstantial with the master-slave relationship. This is why the legal abolition of slavery does not transform ipso facto the black-white racialist distinction. But we can extend Kamala Visweswaran’s analysis and note that Dumont makes the same type of reasoning error with regard to slavery that he criticizes American sociologists. Indeed, Dumont isolates certain features of slave relations by ignoring that slavery is an economic, social and political system which cannot be reduced to a hierarchical dimension, as he corrects himself later, but without modifying his analysis.
A comparative sociology of minority groups
This detour through the question “ Negro » seen in the light of the comparative sociology of Louis Dumont leads Kamala Visweswaran to directly question the sociology of India. Why do the most eminent works of this discipline not allow us to think about discrimination based on caste belonging? ? The nodal point on which the author anchors her reflection is the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) which was held in Durban in 2001. During this conference, representatives of Dalit groups attempted to have caste discrimination recognized as being homologous to racial discrimination, forging the notion of “ casteism » to designate a mode of operation similar to that of racism. The Indian government, then led by the national Hindu right-wing party, the Bharata Janata Party, was forced to firmly oppose this demand, which also aroused strong resistance from Indian sociologists located more to the left of the political field. . Against the point of view of Dalit organizations, the opinion according to which race is biological and caste is social, caste discrimination and casteism being in no way comparable to racist discrimination, has prevailed.
However, Kamala Visweswaran shows, by abandoning the notion of race to the biological sciences, in the tradition of the work of Franz Boas and his heirs, Melville Herskovits, Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict in particular, but also of Claude Lévi-Strauss to whom she devotes a chapter, or by rejecting this notion as unscientific, according to the point of view defended for example by Ashley Montagu, anthropology leaves an empty space that the notion of culture comes to occupy at the point of everything cover it up and no longer explain anything. In both cases, the author emphasizes, this notion has become “ as essentialist and deterministic as the notion of race was until then “.
The work then takes a fascinating turn when Kamala Visweswaran brings to light the little-known links between three figures as different as WEB Du Bois, the first significant black American sociologist, Max Weber who visited the United States, particularly the South, in 1904, and finally BR Ambedkar was then a student at Columbia University in New York where he gave a paper entitled Castes in India. Their Mechanism, Genesis and Developmentat the seminar of the anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser in May 1916. On the one hand, from the beginning of the XIXe century, Du Bois imported the notion of caste to highlight the nature of racial relations in the slave South of the United States and, on the other hand, Weber and Ambedkar drew on the work of Du Bois with whom they corresponded . What these sociologists have in common is that they have outlined connections between the situations of three minority and dominated groups: blacks, untouchables but also Jews, about whom Ambedkar notes that the notion of ghetto can be applied to the segregation of which the Untouchables are victims in India. Taking up these forgotten areas of another comparative sociology, argues Kamala Visweswaran, should help us understand what these groups have in common. The title of the book, at first glance enigmatic, then finds its meaning. “ Un/common Cultures » invites us to share common ground with these groups, contrary to social science work which, positing difference before any comparison, locks the facts studied into cultural essentialism. immeasurable “.
We are often tempted to engage in discussion with the author, particularly on the work of Louis Dumont, reduced too quickly to a structuralist exercise. The original analyzes devoted to the question of gender in situations of political asylum requests (chapter 7) could also be linked to the criticism she develops of Dumont, as the notion of hierarchy, here again, casts a veil modest on the reality of the status of women in India. Finally, by defending the cause of a “ Subordinate Sociology » – the subaltern groups here encompassing Dalits, tribal populations, Muslims and women – Kamala Visweswaran is part of a collective project which only reverses the criticized point of view, remaining caught in an equally partial binary opposition .
But it is not necessary to agree on all points with the author to follow her stimulating analysis of the sociology of India, certain forms of which she judges “ internationalist by aim but nationalist by orientation “. This is food for thought for a practice of social sciences without national borders.