Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 4 of 7

Edgar ThurstonProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5
Word count
860K words
Chapters
86

Tags

English Originals Culture Human GeographyEthnographySocial ObservationSouthern IndiaFolk Customs

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 4 of 7 by Edgar ThurstonAuthor: Thurston, Edgar, 1855-1935,Language: English, Class: DS: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Asia, Release Date: Jun 21, 2013

Editor's review

This is Volume 4 of Thurston's seven-volume Castes and Tribes of Southern India, a compendium of ethnographic survey material that records, entry by entry, the names, customs, occupations and beliefs of communities across southern India, carrying the perspective and limitations of its colonial surveyors. Its value lies first in its source material: it offers primary texts for the study of southern Indian social structure, local religion and colonial knowledge production, and can also be consulted and compared by researchers of genealogy, place names and material culture. It should be read as a historical document rather than an objective encyclopedia, with attention to its classificatory framework and the standpoint of its recorders, and read alongside later critical scholarship. The electronic edition facilitates full-text searching and excerpting, making it suitable for desk-reference use rather than continuous reading for pleasure.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Begin with the introduction or editor's note to understand the survey background and format, then look up specific entries as needed.
  2. Read alongside later critical studies of colonial ethnography, marking passages of classificatory framing and value judgment.
  3. Use the electronic edition's full-text search for keywords of place names, occupations and rituals, and build your own index notes.
  4. Read only one or two entries at a time and take excerpts, avoiding treating historical records as contemporary conclusions.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this book suitable for reading from cover to cover? Not really. It is a survey compendium arranged by entry, better suited as a reference work for looking up specific communities, customs or regions; reading it straight through tends to bog down in fragmentary details and makes the overall picture hard to grasp.
How should its classifications and descriptions be treated? Critically. The text emerged from a colonial survey context, and its classificatory framework and value judgments carry the limitations of their time; it should be read against later anthropological criticism and local accounts rather than cited directly as objective fact.
What practical methods are there for reading the electronic edition? Use full-text search to locate keywords, and make entry indexes and excerpts as you read; for topics of interest, read several adjacent entries together and note their locations for later verification and citation.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Edgar Thurston Author · British · 1855–1935

Edgar Thurston (1855–1935) was a British zoologist, anthropologist, and ethnographer. From 1885 to 1908 he served as curator of the Madras Government Museum, where he also taught anatomy, and he later became Superintendent of the Ethnographic Survey of the Madras Presidency. Thurston's writing is marked by field investigation and systematic classification, with close attention to the social groups, customs, and beliefs of southern India. His major work is the seven-volume Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909); he also wrote Omens and Superstitions of Southern India (1912). These works have long been regarded as important reference materials for the study of southern Indian society and folklore, and eight of his works are held in this collection.