Author: Ciotti, Manuela

Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Volume 12, Number 4, December 2006 , pp. 899-916(18)

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Abstract:

This article analyses the ideological uses of formal education in a community of Chamars (former `Untouchables' or Dalits) in northern India. In particular, it focuses on the ways it is deployed for self- and community improvement. Education is especially needed to forge an alternative to the inherited, essentialized, and derogatory Chamar identity. Furthermore, recent anti-establishment political mobilization amongst the low castes in northern India has provided new impetus for accelerating identity change. In order to grasp the nature and extent of Chamar social transformation, I explore notions of the past, aspects of ritual, and folk theories of socialization. Drawing from these, an underlying protean self and community substance emerges in which the remaking of the present is tied to the remaking of the past. Against this backdrop, I show the contradictory nature of the effects of education. On the one hand, there is the constructed and shared `educated' substance which acts as a unifying force amongst the Chamars vis-à-vis outsiders. On the other, education as an individualizing experience and related processes of upward mobility fragment the community body politic, leaving the `liberating' effect of education embedded in the production of new inequalities.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00369.x

Publication date: 2006-12-01

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