Rivalry and Tribute is a book written by Bruce Elliot Tapper that offers a peek into a 1970's village society in India.
This book is a study of the interplay between society and ritual, set in a village in Andhra Pradesh in south India. Tapper considers the dynamics of competition -- between people and between groups -- and explains the significance of Hinduism in their lives. In particular it focuses on Gavara farmers in the sugarcane growing belt of Visakhapatnam district in the context of historical and contemporary shifts in wealth and power.
The book presents case studies and statistical data on such issues as landholding, loan-giving, wealth, divorce, dispute settlement, leadership, and inter-caste economic relations. It examines rivalries between brothers, tensions in the relationship between husbands and wives, inequalities between caste members, and competitive aspects of settlement growth. It documents controversies over the conduct of festivals, which arose from such rivalries. Above all, it defines the essential principles of social organization- hierarchy (of age, sex and caste) and mutual obligations (among kinsmen and between caste groups)
This book describes beliefs -- including those about obligations toward deities, ideologies about the character of women, and ideas about female deities, astrology, and evil eye -- explaining them in terms of their social significance. It highlights the importance of puja -- a basic form of Hindu worship -- which it interprets as a symbolic payment of tribute, expressing a moral code that links the acceptance of hierarchy and social obligations with the maintenance of health and well-being.
The full range of rituals -- life cycle, seasonal, and agricultural -- are examined in detail, with discussion of the ways they define and reaffirm the basic structures of society despite rivaling and competitive tendencies.
Famous quotes containing the words rivalry, society, ritual, village, south and/or india:
“Sisters define their rivalry in terms of competition for the gold cup of parental love. It is never perceived as a cup which runneth over, rather a finite vessel from which the more one sister drinks, the less is left for the others.”
—Elizabeth Fishel (20th century)
“I’ve thought about how, were we to suddenly receive the freedom about which we talk so much when we spar with one another, we would not know what to do with it at first. We would expend it on denouncing one another in the newspapers for spying, for love of the ruble, we would frighten society with protestations that we have no people, no science, no literature, nothing at all!”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straightshooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear—the city of London and the South Seas.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“India is an abstraction.... India is no more a political personality than Europe. India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)