Outcast Month in a Nutshell

This being the last week of Outcast Month, we will briefly consider the various aspects of social rejection that were explored this month in Athropology at Suite 101.

This is the last week of "Outcast Month". Over the past month, we have looked at various aspects of social exclusion. Here, we will take a moment to look back and consider the few aspects we were able to explore over the past four weeks.

We started off by looking at our need to belong from an evolutionary standpoint. For our ancestors, membership to small groups protected them against all sorts of things. Belonging to a group was crucial for survival. And while we don't need groups to protect us from wildlife or weather, we are deeply social creatures and social banishment is very threatening to our wellbeing. In this first article , we concluded that our desire to belong to a group, to know and to be known is universal and the fear of rejection and the pain of social rejection too, is shared by us all.

In the second article in this series on outcasts we explored the social and personal factors that contribute to people becoming outcasts. One of the insights that emerged from the research on these contributing factors is that social rejection has a lot to do with the degree of similarity or "fit" between the person and the group. If a person "fits in" well, there is no problem but when a person does not "fit in", when there is little similarity between an individual and the members of the group, then he or she is at risk of becoming an outcast. And once a person has become a social outcast, he or she is caught in a vicious cycle of loneliness that is very hard to break.

After these theoretical explorations, we looked at a specific example of social isolation- India's Untouchables. In this article we looked at the Hindu caste system. Discrimination based on caste membership is, since India's independency in 1947, illegal, yet it is alive and well, especially in rural areas. Going back 2,000 years and perhaps the oldest system of social hierarchy, India's caste system renders one in six Indians "impure". They are the Untouchables.

This ancient system of social stratification rests on the basic premise that, based on karma and purity of one's livelihood, a person is born into one of four castes. Those born as Brahmans are priests and teachers; Kshatriyas are rulers; Vaisyas are merchants and traders and Sudras are laborers. Untouchables are a fifth group considered so unworthy that it is placed outside of the caste system. They are, in quite a literal sense, out-castes, better known as Dalits.

Millions of Dalits are trapped in an inexorable cycle of extreme poverty, illiteracy, and oppression. And on top of that, there is violence. In the last article in this series, we considered the plight of Dalit women, which is especially depressing. They suffer double discrimination, one based on caste, the other on gender. Many young Dalit girls for example, end up as prostitutes under the guise of the religious practice devadasis, meaning "female servant of god", sexually serving upper-caste members. Many of them are eventually sold to an urban brothel.

Dalit women are frequently raped, gang-raped, beaten, tortured or forced to walk through the streets naked as punishment for something she or her family has done (Amnesty International 2005).

This brings us full circle to our first article . Evolution has instilled us with a powerful need to belong. Throughout human history social exile has been tantamount to the death sentence. Rejection is pretty much universally experienced as negative and painful, and this experience affects the whole of us: behavior, emotion, perception and cognition. The reason for it, the desire to belong, is equally universal, although the way it is enacted depends differs depending on culture.