Caste_System

Caste System I. INTRODUCTION Are you really what you eat' Why are people born with certain unique tendencies' Are matter and spirit separate, or the same' Although seemingly unrelated, these questions are unified by the subject under consideration in this paper: the Hindu caste system. The caste system itself is unified by the concern of ritual purity. According to the Encyclop'dia Britannica: the caste system has been a dominating aspect of social organization for thousands of years. A caste, generally designated by the term jati ("birth"), refers to a strictly regulated social community into which one is born. In general, a person is expected to marry someone within the same jati, follow a particular set of rules for proper behavior (in such matters as kinship, occupation, and diet), and interact with other jatis according to the group's position in the social hierarchy. ("India") Among Hindus, the thousands of jatis are grouped into four large clusters called varnas, which is loosely translated as “color”. Whether this refers to skin color or to attributes of character depends on one’s perspective. Kelly Ross, a non-Hindu college philosophy instructor, believes that “these sound suspiciously like skin colors; and, indeed, there is an expectation in India that higher caste people will have lighter skin.” In contrast, a Hindu web page asserts that caste, purity, one, system, pure, people, india, gods, hindu, brahmins, theory, castes, society, social, particles, marriott, jati, body, because, varnas, part, matter, food, code, three, ritual, person, one’s, impurity, explain, davis, work, therefore, skin, ritually, pollution, order, must, make, made, later, hindus, higher, hierarchy, coded, changes, born, between, being