Stigma and separation: parian status and community persistence in a scottish fishing village
This paper addresses the problem of how and why a small, dependent, and stigmatized occupational community may maintain its social identity long after the material basis for its existence has disappeared. It examines the life history of Ferryden, an east coast Scottish "fishing village" which does not fish. It will argue that the ideology ofthe fisherfolk, who have historically been marked as a distinct and low-prestige occupational, residential, and kin-based group, has been used to redefine and preserve village unity in the face of drastic ecological change. It argues further that this means of cultural adaptation contains the seeds of its own destruction and will, in the long run, prove fatal for community identity. Studies of occupational communities in complex societies suggest a strong link between work, residence, and social image (Horobin 1957; Dennis, Henriques et al. 1969; Lummis 1977). The example of Ferryden suggests the possibility ofa consider? able lag between the ecological and the symbolic transformation ofa community's status. The dynamics of boundary-making between fisherfolk and nonfisherfolk will be placed within a context of economic and political dominance and dependency in eastern Scotland. The discussion is based upon data collected during a year of fieldwork and archival research in Ferryden and Montrose in 1975 and 1976. Villages may now have surpassed tribes as archetypal anthropological units of study. They have become our preserve in the sociological wilderness of complex societies. There is even some concern that villages, like tribal societies, might be endangered (Mead 1980). However, the term "village" suffers from very nearly the same epistemological ambiguity as "tribe" (Fried 1975). That is, everyone uses it, and few bother to define it. Villages may be large or small, isolated or enmeshed in an urban matrix. Villages may house semi-autonomous rural cultivators or industrial wage-slaves. They may be found in tribal, capitalist, or socialist economies (Halpern 1967:122-123). Often, however, it is assumed that villages share a crucial attribute which is often considered to be lacking in the urban setting: a sense of community, of emotional as well as interactional boundedness. Cohen (1982) stresses this affective component in the introduction to his edited volume on rural British communities, which he aptly titles Belonging. However, the literature on British communities also informs us that not all who live in villages "belong" (Fleming 1979; Strathern 1981; Elias and Scotson 1965; Jenkins et al. 1960). As Strathern (1982:249) points out, "an unwarranted
Staying in or getting out: social capital and occupational decision-making among Louisiana's Croatian oyster harvesters
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The Political Role of India's Caste Associations
IT IS ONE OF THE PARADOXES of Indian politics that India's ancien regime, surely one of the oldest and most deeply rooted in the world, produced no reaction. In three-fifths of India the nationalist middle classes which emerged out of the British colonial experience aimed not only at independence but also at the transformation of Indian society. The Rebellion of i857 is the only historical event in which the old order attempted to preserve itself, but its causes and objectives were so ambiguous that its meaning remains open to serious dispute even today. At Independence, the vestigial political expression of the ancien re'gime, the princely states, which covered two-fifths of India's territory, swiftly collapsed. This event was as much the result of the atrophied condition of the institutions and wills of the ruling order as of the skill with which the Indian Government (through Sardar Patel) managed the negotiations. Only a few minor local parties today stand for a full return to the rule of Brahmans and Kshatryas according to the precepts of dharma or traditional duty, and they are ineffectual.1 There is one perspective in which the absence of a reaction in the European sense is not surprising: within Hinduism, conflict (at the level of theology, philosophy and law) has generally been dealt with less by confrontation of adversaries, struggle and decision, than by compartmentalization, absorption or synthesis. And absorption appears likely to be the fate of the ancien regime's most central and durable institution-caste. Within the new context of political democracy, caste remains a central element of Indian society even while adapting itself to the values and methods of democratic politics. Indeed, it has become one of the chief means by which the Indian mass electorate has been attached to the processes of democratic politics. The appeal of India's relatively weakly articulated voluntary associations is confined to the urban-educated who are more or less attuned to the modern political culture. Caste, however, provides channels of communication and bases of leadership and organization which enable those still submerged in the traditional society and culture to transcend the technical political illiteracy which would otherwise handicap their ability to participate in democratic