Two Villages in Orissa (India) [written in 1958]

This chapter attempts to mark the place of social anthropology between history and the study of culture on the one side, and, on the other side, economics and political science. By taking into account the political and economic relationships which the people of the villages have with the world outside and the effect of these relationships on village structures, they explain why the untouchables of both villages made their protest. Both Baderi and in Bisipara an untouchable assaulted a person of clean caste. The Baderi Pans were less wealthy, relatively to their own clean castes, than were the Bisipara Pans; they had no men of influence; they had no educated men and no one in touch with outside political movements, while among the Bisipara Pans there was a Congress agent and two men who were candidates for the Orissa Legislative Assembly.