Irawati Karve — kinship zones, caste, Koyna, Yuganta

Profile

Irawati Karve — kinship, caste formation, regional India; Indology meets fieldwork.

• Trained in Germany; worked from Deccan/Pune intellectual base.
• Shelf: kinship zones; caste formation; markets; displacement; inheritance; Yuganta.

Caste formation

• Castes form through multiple processes — tribal incorporation, occupation, sect, migration.
• Rejects single-cause origin; regional history matters.
• Links tribe→caste pathways with cultural absorption themes (compare Bose HMTA).

Weekly markets

• Periodic markets as nodes of rural exchange across caste and village.
• Social information, marriage networks and hierarchy perform in market space.
• Economy is social — not only price signals.

Koyna displaced

• Study of communities displaced by Koyna dam project.
• Development-induced displacement: loss of land, kinship disruption, rehabilitation gaps.
• Early Indian anthropological voice on big-project human cost.

Kinship zones (N / S / C / E)

India is not one kinship template — Karve mapped regional tendencies.

• Northern zone: strong patriliny, village exogamy, gotra idiom, hypergamy tendencies.
• Southern zone: cross-cousin marriage common; different affinity logic; Dravidian kinship.
• Central zone: transitional mix of northern and southern features.
• Eastern zone: further variation; some matrilineal pockets in broader East/NE teaching map.
• Always say 'regional tendencies', never 'every household'.

Inheritance and Phaltan

• Inheritance patterns follow kinship zones — patrilineal land/name vs matrilineal alternatives.
• Phaltan (and Deccan field) used for concrete kinship/caste observation in teaching notes.
• Women's structural dependence often tracks patrilineal property rules.

**Yuganta** themes

• Yuganta: reading Mahabharata characters as human, historical, end-of-an-age.
• Indological imagination — epic as social document of values and gender.
• Shows Karve bridging text and anthropology of Indian civilisation.