I think some Supreme Court judge
- Caste system was based on 'division of labour'. This was advocated by Adam Smith too.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Twitter
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
About Me
- Manju Edangam
- 43 years old. Son. Brother. Husband. Father. 5'8". Paternal Lineage: R2a1* and Maternal Lineage: M64*. Slow metabolizer of Caffeine. Less likely to avoid errors. Neolocal. Pro-matriliny and pro-ambiliny. Between identities. IQ-94. Solid Middle Class. Fairly dark skinned. Pro-Monogamy and Pro-Bigamy. Anti-Smart pragmatism. Anti-Sense of humour. Meat eater. Lives in a realm where the line between farce and reality blurs.
My Regular Blog
Srikanth's Translipi
Blog Archive
Labels
- Andhra Pradesh (1)
- Anthropology (2)
- Art of War (2)
- Bengaluru (2)
- Blogging (13)
- Books (2)
- Call My Agent (1)
- Classical Dance (2)
- Clothes (1)
- Daughter (1)
- Dravidians (1)
- Dream (5)
- Education (1)
- Fear (1)
- Feminism (2)
- Fiction (1)
- Fish (1)
- Food (1)
- Food Fiction (3)
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1)
- Grammar (1)
- Greek Science (3)
- hallucination (1)
- How to fry without oil (2)
- Kannada (1)
- Kannada Medium (2)
- Kannada Short Story (1)
- Kannada Translation (2)
- Linguistics (10)
- Malayali (2)
- Moksha (2)
- Movie Review (10)
- Neuroscience (1)
- Notes (2)
- Other blogs (1)
- P Z Myers (1)
- Personal (47)
- Philosophy (5)
- Poem (11)
- Poetry (5)
- Pointlessness (2)
- Politics (1)
- Population Genetics (3)
- Postmartem (1)
- Propaganda (2)
- Rashomon stories (1)
- Scott Adams (1)
- Sexism (2)
- Short Story (1)
- Sociology (1)
- Translations (1)
- Truth and Reconciliation (5)
- Tulu tribe (3)
- TV Serial Review (3)
- Vertigo (1)
- Witless (1)
- Worldly Matters (23)
- ಹನಿಗವನ (4)
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
Not sure what Smith said but division of labor in the Capitalist system is based on supposed free competence between offerers of work, workers. Hence the caste system does not fit: it needs that everybody is let free to compete in order to get a free market (that in the case of labor is closer to the ideal thing than in other case, where oligopoly rules).
ReplyDeleteAs an afterthought, castes can be considered as the division based on occupation. It has nothing to do with division of labour. By division of labour, Smith meant division of various parts of a single job. Each occupational caste might have employed that technique but even without the caste system that could have been easily achieved.
ReplyDeleteAlso, division based on occupation isolated interdependent occupations thus innovations became almost nil. If I take the example of weaving, generally weavers used very primitive looms. The manufacture of loom was the job of the carpenter caste. However, the caste specific knowledge, know-how isolation continued their primitive state until the outside influence in the form of Muslims or Christians.
I suppose there could have been people who could combine different knowledge and come up with innovative ideas. This could never happen in the caste system, which I probably should call 'isolation of knowledge'.
What you say now reminds me somewhat of academic hyper-specialization. Nowadays for most purposes, a single field is unable to achieve too much: you need multi-disciplinary cooperation. And obviously this also applies to less scholarly jobs.
ReplyDeleteBut if you observe the present multiple fields themselves were the later division. They made sense as independent fields as long other fields were held constant. It was not the case that other fields were absent.
ReplyDeleteBut isn't that what you said for castes too? While the technology was constant... it would work, however, as things do change (and specially nowadays), the various fields need of increased cooperation or interaction to be able to improve.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that was a thought from one of my thinkings and not a comprehensive observation. Let us consider two examples from the caste system and the present day field. Weaving for the caste system and semiconductor industry for the present day fields.
ReplyDelete- In weaving, both clothe production and loom innovation were stagnant because of isolation of knowledge. Hence the saturation is nothing but collective stagnation.
- In semiconductor field innovation continued for very long in transistor with a single material (Silicon). However, further innovation may require the help of material science, chemistry etc... So in the present case, multidisciplinary co-operation arises when one of the field hits its limit with the other fields held constant.
So, analogy of isolation of caste occupations isn't exactly same as the multiple fields.
Frankly, I'm not a fan of analogies. First of all, people just don't bother to check whether they are doing any kind of false analogies. In my opinion, analogies take away or diversify actual characteristics of the subject in question.
ReplyDeleteNot sure if the analogy is totally valid but I understood that if the same person or various people who would linked by social ties (family or close friends) would work on clothing and carpentry, they could have improved the system more easily, as did other ethnicities for which castes were not a burden.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, I have already mentioned that Medieval Europe was largely constrained by a system similar (not totally identical: probably slightly more flexible and not so strongly sanctioned by religion) to the Indian caste system. Artisan guilds worked in fact the way you say for castes: their aim was not to improve but to stabilize, granting production quality and stable prices. This effective oligopoly, as you may know, was breached by outsourcing production to ill-qualified peasants in rural areas where guilds had no jurisdiction. This happened precisely first in the field of textile industry and is considered by most historians as the beginning of the end of the Old Regime in the economic area. The process was lead by bourgeois entrepreneurs who also managed to make some key innovations in the production system that precisely allowed unqualified workers to produce well enough. This is the real beginning of the industrial revolution: breaching the power of guilds and creating the beginnings of a working class (i.e. not just peasants anymore).
Guilds, with their rigid frameworks, could hardly ever have achieved that. But they achieved security and stability for their members and that was what they aimed for.
I'm somewhat puzzled by this claim:
ReplyDeleteSo in the present case, multidisciplinary co-operation arises when one of the field hits its limit with the other fields held constant.
How come? In academic research no field is kept constant: they always strive to improve the knowledge and applications. There is absolutely no point in researching nothing.
I really don't understand what you mean with this.
Guild system of various occupational groups was observed since 300 BCE in India. It has been argued that the caste identities were solidified thro' this system. Though from my readings, in South India at least, guilds were made up of multiple occupational groups of artisan-merchants and merchants. So it was not all that exclusive setup. It might have been possible for any man to enter certain occupations and later get the caste identity. The caste of many groups were solidifying until 19th century (Susan Baily).
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the purity-pollution associated with the caste identity made it impossible for a person get the knowledge of other occupations. Probably, merchants might have the best chance of bringing together various skills for a better product. However, fear of pollution either from those people and/or the secrecy with which certain castes guarded their knowledge most likely barred the flow of knowledge.
I really don't understand what you mean with this.
I was only talking about consumer products. The present day academic structure is irrelevant for those times.
Yeah, the very strong religious taboos of the Hindu caste system were surely a terrible barrier for innovation and "interdisciplinarity". In Europe the religious sanction was never so strong and there were no clear purity/pollution ideas either (except in the moral stuff of sin and repentance/pardon, which is only very loosely related).
ReplyDelete