OPUS Workshop: Axes of inequality in Indian society, their intersections and contradictions with Jonathan Parry; 28 February 2025 [Closed-door]
The workshop with Jonathan Parry will take off from a small handful of his writings illustrative of his three major Indian field research projects: his study of caste and kinship in Kangra (carried out in the 1960s); his study of death in Banaras (carried out in the 1970s and 1980s), and his study of industrial and other manual workers in the central Indian steel town of Bhilai (carried out between 1993 and 2014). Though these ethnographies have raised a considerable array of divergent issues, certain strands run throughout, including a focus on the sociology of exchange and a central preoccupation with different dimensions of social inequality. Discussion of this second theme is to be the principal focus of the workshop, which will more especially be concerned with the way in which different forms of inequality (in particular, caste, class and gender) intersect, the ways in which they are ideologically legitimated, and the contradictions and tensions they inevitably produce. The sociology/anthropology of India has routinely been charged with losing itself in ‘exceptionalism’ and with thereby having little to contribute to more general sociological theory. In the light of these readings, and of the discussion they might hopefully provoke, should we conclude that that is a ‘fair cop’ (a reasonable charge) – or just calumny?

Jonathan Parry is a social anthropologist who originally trained in the University of Cambridge, and who subsequently held posts during most of his academic career at the London School of Economics, where is currently an Emeritus Professor.
Professor Parry has conducted extensive field research in various parts of India on various different topics. His first study was in a rural area in the sub-Himalayan region where he focused on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship and marriage. He subsequently worked in the city of Banaras where he studied the various communities of ‘sacred specialists’ in one way or other concerned with the ‘business’ of death – specialists who preside over rituals involved with the disposal of the corpse, the fate of the soul and the purification of the mourners. In the early 1990s, Professor Parry turned his attention to the study of industrial labour in the steel city of Bhilai, located in what is now the state of Chhattisgarh. The public sector Bhilai Steel Plant was built with Soviet aid and collaboration on a green field site in the late 1950s and early 1960s, rapidly became one of the largest steel plants in Asia and provided a magnet for a great deal of private sector industrial development.
The results of these studies have been published in three major ethnographic monographs: Caste and kinship in Kangra (1979); Death in Banaras (1994), and Classes of labour: Work and life in a central Indian Steel Town (2019/20). Parry has also co-edited a number of volumes on more general anthropological and sociological themes, including: Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge, 1982); Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge, 1989); The worlds of Indian industrial labour (Sage, 1999); Institutions and Inequalities: Essays in honour of André Béteille (OUP, 1999); Questions of anthropology (Berg, 2007); Industrial work and life: An anthropological Reader (2009, Berg); The persistence of poverty in India (Social Science Press, 2014), and Industrial labour on the margins of capitalism: Precarity, class and the neo-liberal subject (Berghahn, 2018). His journal articles and chapters in volumes of collected essays address a wide range of issues including literacy, migration, poverty, precarity, corruption, construction labour, and trade union politics; Untouchability and affirmative action; cosmopolitanism, suicide, asceticism, ritual and sacred geography.
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mwfdelhi (February 12, 2025). OPUS Workshop: Axes of inequality in Indian society, their intersections and contradictions with Jonathan Parry; 28 February 2025 [Closed-door]. Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF Delhi). Retrieved March 27, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/131cm