Dumont, Louis. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications .

Complete
Revised English edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Louis Dumont expands upon his fieldwork on the Pramalai Kallars of South India in 1949
(Une sous-caste de l’Inde du Sud) and the Indological literature on caste to produce his
theoretical study of caste and hierarchy, Homo Hierarchicus. Dumont engages with the
historiography of India and sociological theories of J.H. Hutton, M.N. Srinivas, McKim
Marriott, Emile Durkheim, and Eugene Weber. With the question of ‘caste’ as the central
problematic, Dumont argues that caste is not social stratification, but a system of hierarchy
based on inequality. As stated in his preface, Dumont attempts to move away from Western,
exogenous concepts of social class to understand caste as a total social fact. Dumont
sought to ‘isolate’, study, and develop new theories on ‘hierarchy’ and at the core, concepts
of the pure and impure—what he believed to be the predominant ideological facet of the
Indian social system. (Dumont, xxi).

Dumont begins his study by framing the essential questions of the individual, society,
equality, and hierarchy within the study of caste. Through this introductory reference to the
Victorian evolutionary concepts of the ‘unity of mankind,’ Dumont demonstrates his
Maussian and Durkheimian influences to study hierarchy to reveal larger ‘elementary
aspects’ of society. Furthermore, Dumont’s introductory chapter demonstrates his
comparative approach that carries on throughout the work; rather than a focused historical
study of Indian caste, Dumont examines social relations and hierarchy in order to make
theoretical comparisons and conclusions. This is most evident in his question of the
individual. Dumont argues that ‘traditional’ societies emphasize society as a whole,
collective Man, and how individuals fit within order and hierarchy. Meanwhile ‘modern’
societies emphasize the individual as the ”indivisible elementary man.” (Dumont, 11) The
concept of the individual is core to the progression of Dumont’s analysis on equality and
hierarchy.[1] Dumont argues that hierarchy emerges from a consensus of values and ideas
and is essential to social life. In this way, hierarchy reveals elementary aspects of society
since “hierarchy encompasses social agents and social categories.” (Dumont, 20)

Dumont defines caste as a pan-Indian institution, a “system of ideas and values, a formal,
comprehensible rational system.” (Dumont, 35) Most importantly, he explains how caste
groups are distinguished from and connected to one another through (1) separation of
matters of marriage and contact, (2) division of labor, traditions, and professions, and (3)
hierarchy ranking groups as relatively superior or inferior to one another. Dumont argues
that this last aspect of hierarchy is the most important and is manifested in the separation
between the pure and impure.

Expanding on the concept of hierarchy, Dumont distinguishes between Western ideas of

hierarchy as progressive subordination and Indian theories of hierarchy. Rather than
hierarchy resting upon western ideas of linear power and authority, Dumont connects Indian
hierarchy to religious values, the four varnas, and the relationship to the whole. Building
upon McKim Marriott’s interactional theories of rank, Dumont explains that hierarchy is the
“principle by which the elements of a whole are ranked in relation to the whole.” (Dumont
91) Dumont later expands upon the idea of the hierarchy and relationship to the whole in
his example of the jajmani system. Dumont describes the jajmani system not as economics,
but as a hereditary system of labor and relationships, of prestations and counter-
prestations. Dumont explains that the system is “founded on an implicit reference to the
whole, which, in its nature, is religious, or if one prefers, a matter of ultimate values.”
(Dumont 106) However, Dumont does not disregard concepts of politics and power in its
entirety and disaggregates the authority between and within caste groups. Religious
authority, Dumont argues, rests within the hands of the Brahmans and temporal authority in
the hands of kings, judges, and law of dharma. Furthermore, the unit of the village has
intricate, plural forms of authority rather than simply linear. (Dumont, 182)

The conclusion chapter returns to the possibility to compare and export the idea of caste to
other societies. Dumont reminds the reader that throughout the book, he had attempted to
understand the indigenous concepts, values, and ideas of social groups and social facts,
“bound together in a structural whole.” (Dumont, 201) Additionally, he had linked caste to
Hindu beliefs about pure and impure. Dumont reasserts the difference between caste and
‘social stratification’, where the concept of caste is tied deeply to the relationship between
status and power. In this way, is Dumont attempting to write an ethnosociology of Indian
caste, or does he still privilege a Western lens in his repeated comparison to social
stratification?