Fordham University Press Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching (Commonalities)

Practicing Caste attempts a fundamental break from the tradition of caste studies, showing the limits of the historical, sociological, political, and moral categories through which it has usually been discussed. Engaging with the resources that phenomenology, structuralism, and poststructuralism offer to our thinking of the body, Jaaware helps to illuminate the ethical relations that caste entails, especially around its injunctions concerning touching. The resulting insights offer new ways of thinking about sociality that are pertinent not only to India but also to thinking the common on a planetary basis. Review The book is a remarkable exercise in showing what is possible when we attend to caste as if we were confronting it for the first time. . . . In posing caste as a problem for ethics, Jaaware returns to that fundamental question of what it means to be-with-others in a startlingly new manner. . . . A text that has so much to teach us about being together and apart. Author: Anupama Rao, from the Foreword This spellbindingly orchestrated book develops its philosophical theory of caste as a practice of touching and not-touching, luminously disclosing caste as a way of regulating, coding, and living an originary and unconditioned touch. It reveals the ethics and politics of touchability as a secret structure of Indic and other modernities. Putting Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger into conversation with Ambedkar and Phule, Practicing Caste explodes the discussion of caste from its South Asian enclosure. Required reading for anyone interested in a world-spanning comparative account of modernity. Author: Ben Conisbee Baer, Princeton University From the Author Aniket Jaaware (Author) Aniket Jaaware is Professor of English at Shiv Nadar University. Anupama Rao (Foreword By) Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College. She is the author of The Caste Question (California, 2009). About the Author Aniket Jaaware is Professor of English at Shiv Nadar University. Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College. She is the author of The Caste Question (California, 2009).