Class and Caste

Recently, writers on aspects of social stratification have been thinking of social status in terms of a continuum of societies. At one end are societies in which the status of the individual tends to remain fixed for life; at the other are societies in which the opportunity for advancement of status of the individual is recognized and even encouraged. In other words, at the one end are caste systems, at the other open class systems. In 1498 the Portuguese adventurers who landed at Calicut with Vasco de Gama observed that in India society was organized in a number of endogamous groups with inferior and superior social positions held in perpetuity. They compared this with the social mobility familiar to them in the West, and called it caste. Since then, almost numberless writers have made the same observations. A recognition of relative rigidity of social status among different status systems, then, is no contribution of modern sociologists. What is new, however, is an insistent attempt by many students of social stratification to identify rigidity of social status, in whatever social context it is found, with caste; and to conceive of castes as mere petrified, rigid, or endogamous social classes. For instance, A. L. Kroeber says

Caste · Class (philosophy) · Epistemology · Genealogy · Linguistics · Sociology · History · Mathematics · Philosophy · Social and Economic Development in India · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

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