IDEOLOGY AND BEHAVIOUR
Shobita Jain
Women in India and Nepal (Monograph on South Asia No 8) by Michael Allen and S.N. Mukherjee Australian National University, 1983, 297 pp., price not indicated
Sept-Oct 1983, volume 8, No 2

Ideas have a role in ordering cognition of our experiences. While studying a literate soci¬ety as opposed to a primitive one (where one does not expect to encounter a great deal of reflective tradition and the superimposition of ideas of further reflection over the tradition), it is a challenging task to sort out a coherent and at the same time accept¬able grammar of both persis¬tent and syntagmatic struc¬tures. In the sphere of religion there is often a gap between the ideas of higher philo¬sophies and the religious prin¬ciples which guide the laity. The study of various aspects of Hindu ideology, contri¬buting to the formation of views of Hindu women in India and Nepal is a signi¬ficant contribution, both to anthropological literature deal¬ing with analytical ethno¬graphy of religious practice in literate societies and to the increasing body of the publi¬cations on women. Primarily dealing with symbolic systems as related to social hierarchy, all the contributors of the volume have based the view of women in India and Nepal on concepts of purity and pollution. As analysis of ideas at the level of cognition, these interpretations and pre¬sentations of data make interesting linkages between symbols and the social structural implications of con¬ceptions regarding women.

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