The Householder's World: Purity, Power, and Dominance in a Nepali Village.

• Author: Muhlich, Michael

By JOHN GRAY. Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1995. Pp. xiv + 302. Rs 450.

The book takes up a question that is of interest to both South Asian ethnography as well as ethnological theory as such. Simply put, it states the problem of whether we conceive the "person" to be informed by ideals of the outside world, that is the public domain, or by the inside world, that is the domestic domain. Gray's study shows how in Nepal the latter point of view predominated and that it might endure also after Nepal's transition to democracy. Thus in the author's perspective it is not so much the ideology of "caste" but the ontology of the householder's dharma that reinforces enduring social contradictions between hierarchy, or asymmetry, and equality, still significant in South Asian modernizing societies.

Gray's theoretical perspective is inspiring. His starting point is that the smallest units of the social system are as complex as the whole, thus taking a reference from modern chaos theory. However, what is considered the smallest unit of the social system, the household, is not just perceived as an apriori or given social unit, but has to be explained from the perspective of the people themselves. It has to be explained what kind of activities they consider as domestic. This ontological approach leads Gray to the importance of the householder's dharma as the ideal frame of activities which among the Silwal Khatris of Kholagaun forms the basis for the domestic relations of their everyday life. Not only are these relations structured accordingly, but, in addition, so are the relations between the household and the outside world. Following this inside-out perspective, the first four chapters of the book explain the internal relations of the household, while the following four show them unfolding into external relations and relations of power and dominance in the community at large.

The first chapters thus focus on the religiously embedded goals and duties of the householder - briefly, the goal to beget children and thus to create a physical and spiritual enduring unity; the duty to feed the ascetics, in a wider sense to sustain those devoted to dharma; and the duty to sacrifice, which contributes to the enhancement of one's merit and purity. The intentional transformation of these precepts, however, not only creates asymmetry within the household...