Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 6 of 7

Edgar ThurstonProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
801K words
Chapters
81

Tags

English Originals Social Sciences Indian SocietySocial StructureAnthropological ResearchFieldworkReligious CustomsColonial ArchiveFolk CustomsEthnographyTropical South AsiaCaste System

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. 6 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 the sixth of seven volumes of Edgar Thurston's Castes and Tribes of Southern India, a typical product of colonial-era ethnographic survey. Its value is first of all documentary: in entry form it records the names, customs, occupations and oral lore of communities across southern India, offering searchable primary material for the study of South Indian social structure, local history and the history of anthropology. Readers should remain methodologically alert: the author worked within the colonial administrative and survey system, and his classificatory framework and descriptive perspective carry clear period limitations, so some judgments should not be taken as settled fact. This is an English public-domain eBook, large in scale and organized by entry, better suited to reference consultation than straight reading. It suits readers in anthropology and South Asian studies for use in writing and source comparison; general readers without background knowledge may lose their bearings among the dense proper names and categories.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Use it as a reference work: start with the table of contents and index, locate entries by community name or region, and do not read page by page.
  2. While reading, consult critical literature on the history of anthropology and colonial ethnography to examine where the classificatory framework comes from.
  3. Excerpt key entries and note the volume and entry location for later cross-checking with volume seven and other sources.
  4. Where a custom is described uncertainly, seek corroboration from other independent sources rather than treating a single record as conclusive.

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

Can this volume be read on its own? It can be used alone as a reference work, but the seven volumes are continuous in classification and entry arrangement, so reading volume six alone leaves out the framework explained in the other volumes. At least understand the overall scheme, or search across volumes together.
Can the descriptions be taken as objective historical fact? Not directly. The book was produced in a colonial survey context; its categories and observational stance carry period bias, and some accounts rely on informants of the time. Use it alongside later research and multiple sources, mindful of its nature as a historical source.
Any practical advice for using the eBook? Use the electronic text's search function to locate entries by community or place name, and record volume information for citation. Because entries are dense and proper names numerous, organize them with notes or a table so search results do not scatter and become hard to consolidate.

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.