What place does the caste system have in modern India with its globally integrating market economy? The most influential anthropological approaches to caste have tended to emphasize caste as India's traditional religious and ritual order, or (treating such order as a product of the colonial encounter) as shaped politically, especially today by the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Less attention has been paid to caste effects in the economy. This article argues that the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public-policy ‘enclosure’ of caste in the non-modern realm of religion and ‘caste politics’, while aligning modernity to the caste-erasing market economy. Village-level fieldwork in South India finds a parallel public narrative of caste either as ritual rank eroded by market relations or as identity politics deflected from everyday economic life. But, locally and nationally, the effects of caste are found to be pervasive in labour markets and the business economy. In the age of the market, caste is a resource, sometimes in the form of a network, its opportunity-hoarding advantages discriminating against others. Dalits are not discriminated by caste as a set of relations separate from economy, but by the very economic and market processes through which they often seek liberation. The caste processes, enclosures, and evasions in post-liberalization India suggest the need to rethink the modernity of caste beyond orientalist and post-colonial frameworks, and consider the presuppositions that shape understanding of an institution, the nature and experience of which are determined by the inequalities and subject positions it produces.

中文翻译：

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种姓的现代性与市场经济

种姓制度在具有全球一体化市场经济的现代印度有什么地位？对种姓最有影响的人类学方法倾向于强调种姓是印度传统的宗教和仪式秩序，或者（将这种秩序视为殖民遭遇的产物）在政治上形成的，尤其是在今天基于种姓的选举政治的动态中。对经济中的种姓效应的关注较少。本文认为，种姓的学术框架反映了种姓在非现代宗教领域和“种姓政治”中的公共政策“封闭”，同时使现代性与消除种姓的市场经济保持一致。在印度南部的村级田野调查中，我们发现了一种平行的关于种姓的公共叙事，或者是被市场关系侵蚀的仪式等级，或者是偏离日常经济生活的身份政治。但是，在地方和全国范围内，种姓的影响在劳动力市场和商业经济中普遍存在。在市场时代，种姓是一种资源，有时以网络的形式，其机会囤积优势歧视他人。达利特人并没有被种姓歧视为一套与经济分离的关系，而是被他们经常寻求解放的经济和市场过程所歧视。后自由化印度的种姓过程、圈地和逃避表明有必要重新思考超越东方主义和后殖民框架的种姓现代性，