Revision summary
Attributional caste scores groups by listed traits such as diet, occupation and ritual. Ghurye and colonial lists exemplify that approach. Interactional caste ranks groups by who gives and receives food, service and honour. Marriott, Dumont and Srinivas made interaction the test of hierarchy. Lived rank can diverge from textbook attributes.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Attributional studies rank a caste by the traits it is said to possess. Interactional studies rank it by who gives and who receives food, service, women, and honour in daily life. Both describe caste; they do not photograph the same thing.
Body
Attributional approach
- G. S. Ghurye listed features such as segmental division, hierarchy, restrictions on feeding and marriage, civil and religious disabilities, and lack of free occupational choice.
- Census ethnography and many textbooks still score a jati by occupation, diet, dress, and ritual status as if those attributes were a fixed essence.
- The approach is strong for comparison across regions and for legal schedules. It is weak when attributes change while rank stays, or when rank changes while old labels remain.
Interactional approach
- McKim Marriott argued that caste position is produced in transactions: cooked food, raw food, garbage, and ritual service.
- Louis Dumont placed interaction under a binary of pure and impure: who can touch whom is an enactment of ideology, not a list of hobbies.
- M. N. Srinivas’s dominant caste shows that land, numbers, and office can reorder local interaction even when textual attributes stay ‘low’ or ‘high’.
Why the difference matters
- Attribution can freeze a group as vegetarian or priestly while the village already takes its water from another jati’s well on new terms.
- Interaction captures Sanskritization as a change of practice before a change of name, and it captures boycott as a political weapon.
- A full answer uses attributes as claims people make, and interaction as the test of those claims.
Flow diagram
Conclusion
Attributional caste is a catalogue of traits. Interactional caste is a map of exchanges. Indian sociology needs both, but rank is decided in interaction.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Do you agree with the view of Andre Beteille that India's villages are representative of Indian society's basic civilizational values ? Present a sociological overview
Next question on this syllabus topic (2023 · Q2(a)). View answer →
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Is Dumont only attributional because he uses texts?
He starts from ideology, but purity is proven in interaction, not only in a list of traits.
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Which approach helps a fieldworker more?
Interaction: watch who eats together and who refuses. Attributes still help to hear how people describe themselves.
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2019 · Q3(c) · Sociology GS 2 · 10 marks
Give an account of Ranajit Guha's approach in studying 'subaltern class'
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