government officials in India are as uncertain concerning their appropriate roles in deal- ... ment schemes which form part of the country's current five-year plan.
Book Reviews
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Factors identified as leading to such elaboration are the presence of numerous castes within the community, the presence of some stratified interaction among the castes, conformity of individuals to community expectations concerning patterns of stratified interaction, and separation of the community from external systems of ranking inconsistent with the local patterns. Relationships among elaboration and the four suggested determinants are examined first in terms of a comparison of two villages in Aligarh District, Uttar Pradesh, and then in terms of five regions. Granted the weakness of the available bibliographic data, the case for the presence of strong correlations between elaboration and the four determinants is convincing. The question of what determines what is less clearly demonstrated. The “self evident” assumption that “the structure of social sentiments tends to be dependent upon and to reflect the rest of social structure” (p, 4) does not rule out the complementary assumption that the social structure tends to be dependent upon and to reflect the structure of social sentiments. Both possibilities are admitted on pages 58-59, where the author discusses the likelihood of mutual or circular causation. The lack of any significant number of detailed analyses of particular communities has made it necessary to develop much of the argument in terms of the caste structures of rather large regions. Although it may be supposed that regions possess typical or modal patterns, it remains a fact that neighboring villages within the same region may differ markedly in size, in the number of castes included within them, and in their degree of involvement with neighboring villages and the regional culture. On the balance, it is probably true that Kerala villages tend to possess elaboration of a unilinear type, while Coromandel villages tend to possess elaboration of a bifurcate linear type (two more or less independent systems of ranking), but this is certainly not true of all villages in either region and there is not sufficient evidence to exclude the possibility that it is not true of even a majority of the villages in either region. The importance of this study lies, not so much in the confidence with which its conclusions may be accepted, as in the fact that it sets aspects of social structure and expectations about social structure in relationship to each other. Marriott’s use of the term “determinant” is unfortunate because the parts of a social structure or of a body of opinion about social structure are parts of a system and by definition are not independent of each other. What needs to be done is to develop knowledge concerning relationships within a particular system, as Marriott has done, and then to seek independent determinants within the external society and culture, within the ecological setting of the community, and within such processes of historical influence and change as are relevant. The relationships among elaboration and the four other aspects of community structure are of more than local or South Asian importance and should be given consideration in any theory of ranking. Altogether this monograph is innovative and stimulating and should serve to encourage further detailed analysis and comparison of community systems within regions.
Imiian Anthropology in Action. L. P . VIDYARTEI (Ed.). Ranchi, Bihar:Council of Social and Cultural Research, 1960. vi, 144 pp., chapter notes, and references. Rs. 8.00.
Reviewed by ALANR. BEALS,Stafljord Uniwsity Presented in the course of a three day popular seminar entitled “Levelling up Tribal Bihar,” the papers collected in this volume are not primarily directed at a professional audience. Perhaps the principle message conveyed here is that academicians and
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American Anthropologist
[64, 1962)
government officials in India are as uncertain concerning their appropriate roles in dealing with tribal peoples as are their opposite numbers in America. Several of the papers present frank and documented critiques of schemes for tribal development. Vidyarthi examines a scheme for the resettlement of Paharia shifting cultivators and finds that many of the cultivators actually being resettled are in fact plow agriculturalists. Apparently shifting cultivators are hard to catch. Malhotra describes the Birhors who once wandered through the forests in small bands collecting products for sale in nearby towns. Three hundred of them were settled in a single colony and thus deprived of their livelihood. In similar mood, La11 describes the impact of Community Development Programs upon the Oraon; Leuva discusses the working of grain banks in Bihar; and Mathur discusses the problems of Madhya Pradesh. Among the other contributors, Bose, Das, Dube, and Burman discuss basic problems of applied anthropology in brief and sometimes vague terms; Sinha describes a Birhor leader; Das presents an elaborate plan for tribal development; Sarkar finds thae Radar parents and children have markedly different blood group patterns; and Singh determines that the formerly “criminal” tribes of Northern India should properly be described as “Displaced Rajputs of Medieval India.”
Report of the Committee ort Special Multipurpose Tribal Blocks. New Delhi: Ministry of Home Affairs, 1960. iv, 453 pp., 5 appendices, index. Rs. 7.25 or 11s. 6d. Reviewed by C.
VON
F~~RER-HAIMENDORF, University of London
This report is a mine of information on the present position of India’s aboriginal tribes and the problems facing the administrators in charge of the ambitious development schemes which form part of the country’s current five-year plan. Conscious of the need for an improvement in the economic standards of backward areas as a corollary to the impressive industrial development of the more advanced regions, the Government of India has devoted considerable funds to multisided ameliorative schemes located in selected tracts of strong concentrations of tribal populations. The comparatively unsatisfactory progress of some of these schemes led the Ministry of Home Affairs to appoint a committee of enquiry under the distinguished chairmanship of the well known anthropologist and social worker Dr. Verrier Elwin, who serves the Government of India also as Adviser for Tribal Affairs to the North-East Frontier Agency. This committee was entrusted with the task of studying the working of the development schemes in tribal areas and of advising the government on how to administer the schemes more effectively and “give the programme a proper tribal bias.” It consisted of senior civil servants and experienced social workers and spent several months in 1959 and 1960 in visiting representative tribal areas, as well as calling for information from the various States containing strong tribal minorities. The report containing the findings of this committee is unanimous and its drafting betrays throughout the elegant pen of Dr. Elwin. In his passionate advocacy of the rights of the Indian aboriginal, Verrier Elwin is without rival, and it is, therefore, not surprising that the report proves a document informed by profound sympathy no less than by an intimate knowledge of the tribesmen’s problems. These problems remain fundamentally the same as they were 20 years ago, but the progress of other sections of India’s population and the whole emphasis on economic development has accentuated some of their gravity. Far from narrowing the gap between “advanced” and “backward” populations, the general results of India’s first and second five-year plans have tended to widen it.
