Revisiting a popular topic- the Anthropology of Belonging and Solidarity.
Earlier, Suite 101's Anthropology site featured a few articles on Hindu caste system, it's victims and our universal need to belong.
This week's article revisits that discussion, at least in part. Since those previous articles were published here, I have receive numerous emails in response. Since it appears that this is a popular topic, and I revisiting it seems worthwhile.
In revisiting then, I first focused on the question asked by Emile Durkheim toward the end of the nineteenth century: What hold societies together, or what is the nature of solidarity? In many cases, the social glue that keeps societies together is kinship. Many small and simple societies rely on kinship as the basis for the way they function. Shared blood is the glue that keeps these societies together. A good example of this ideology of kinship is the Hindu caste system. This system presents a fixed social order, in which kinship is determined by the link between marriage and social group. This is further linked with livelihood and the division of labour in the community and society at large, as well as with spiritual purity, which determines ones place in the social pecking order. Each person is born into a certain group and he or she marries within this group- not outside of it. He or she has a set way of making a living, also determined by the social group in which he or she is born. Ones place in the group is reinforced on a daily basis by all sorts of behaviors and restrictions thereof and further supported through an elaborate system of belief and ritual.
But what about our contemporary and complex modern societies- what is the social glue that keeps us together? Read this week's article to find out.
