W.E.B. Dubois often referred to race in America as the caste system. Oliver Cox’s Caste, Class, and Racecompared race and caste mediated by class. Most recently, Isabel Wilkerson wrote Caste in America supplanting race with caste. On the other hand, some sociologists and anthropologists are writing about caste as race (Baber 2022). Going back to the classical tradition in Sociology, Max Weber identified caste (and race) as ‘status’, distinguishing the former as sanctioned by religion, in addition to convention and law. Louis Dumont denied comparison between caste and race, treating the former as uniquely Indian on account of the primacy of religion, Hinduism, cementing the twin myths of ‘no caste without Hinduism, no Hinduism without caste’. B. R. Ambedkar compared untouchability in caste to race discrimination in America to argue that the former was relatively more oppressive and difficult to resist.
The panel invites papers dealing with caste and race in a comparative-historical perspective dealing with the question of class in caste and race, with a view to decolonizing sociology and anthropology of race and caste, based on the notion of decolonization used by Faye Harrison (1991).
