#215: A news article on cagots was posted some time back in the christianism thread.
And on this line from the previous post:
But endogamy has the best of all reasons: preservation of the tradition of a nation's (or religion's) communities.
You see this even among brahmanas in various parts of India. Namboodiris only marry among themselves. A more obvious example is the Tamizh brahmana community of Iyers (who, like most Tamizh Hindus, are also found scattered across four southern states). Iyers have x numbers of subsets within them, who will Not intermarry between subsets. It's just not done. (Ancient instances of love-marriages - rare - excepted.) Nowadays, one or two very rare exceptions have been made by families themselves designing to get their progeny married. Otherwise it still does not happen. (Speaks for itself they don't marry brahmanas from elsewhere in Bharatam*, just like other brahmana communities of India would be like the Namboodiris and the Maithilis was it, and marry only within their own communities as well. *Again, love marriages excepted, and so too those Tamizh brahmanas who were more recently forced out of TN into as far as Mumbai and beyond because of DMK-christianism. And even some of the Iyers among the latter tended to still search out members of their own subset for their progeny to marry.)
This is not systematized - as would be meant with "caste" - since I doubt there are ancient nationwide Hindu laws specifying that a region's subset x of brahmana does not marry subset y. Yet because they have historically - for some time - been endogamous communities, with their own local subtraditions, and with an interest in preserving precisely their own ancestral traditions by not marrying out, there is this phenomenon even among communities that are otherwise regarded as having a higher possibility of intermarriage. (In theory, any brahmana may marry another where there are no gotra issues. In practice, I don't know any brahmana community that does that. And it's moreover the case that some simply won't be happy with it: not because it's not allowed by religion, but because it's tradition to preserve their own subcommunity and that of others.)
While some today may favour bringing in new heathen input - Taoists, Shintos :advertising: (themselves very endogamous, the advertising is meant in partial jest: I suspect their ancestors would want their kind preserved too) - one respects heathens' wishes for continuity.
Actually, this holds for so many Hindu communities. E.g. Indian media and activists pretend all the so-called "Dalits" are one group, as if they will intermarry or would have randomly intermarried in the past. Nonsense. They are not related, and even in the same states and localities these Hindu communities exist in their own individual very endogamous ancient communities*, just as brahmanas do.
(* And christians have documented=confessed this in their attempts at conversion.)
Hindu religion generally respects inclinations towards endogamy or at least leaves it alone, which is why those cases of endogamous subcommunities not mentioned in Hindu religion (scriptures) itself continue to exist. There are two things one is dealing with, which things sort of superimpose in society yet also lead partially-independent lives: rules on intermarriage in Hindu religion (there are some, whether universally adhered to, I wouldn't know) versus endogamy in India which is an ancient phenomenon.
Some missionary religions tend to want to do away with endogamy in order to create primary ties to the religion itself (and to some extent and for some time succeed in this, but often spin off new unnatural and highly casteist ones of their own), but most missionary ideologies eventually discover that India - as some other countries - is so set in its ways that the ideology has to be made to work around the status quo regarding endogamous groups if it wants to be more successful.
Christianism is an example of an ideology that actively tries and promotes both. When it realised it has to live with the Indian situation - go with the flow - it is seen to particularly target one community at a time for conversion.
Now rather than ever before is the time when the continuity of endogamy in India is uncertain. Loss of it is a threat* to individual communities and to the preservation of the local ancestral tradition of the subcommunities. There was that bit on Santals that Elst wrote of: that preservation of the community (by adherence to endogamy) was preservation of their religious tradition. It is actually true for other ancient heathen communities in India also. And that is the sort of thing that gets lost in modern changes. Not all change is bad and surely genetic variation is good, but change can have its flipside and the downside to this is quite regretable.
(*The threat is most obviously seen in the absurd uniformity enforced by the invented "Dalit" label: it wipes away the history of a whole bunch of rather unrelated Hindu communities and pretends they have no traditions, no sense of locality and no sense of attachment to any of it, that they're all one ideologically-unaffiliated bunch with no history of self or local community identity and are supposedly essentially "interchangeable". This way, the intention is to subordinate all the concerned into the concocted "Dalit" identity. Just so that this suddenly and artificially homogenised group can then thereafter be conveniently hijacked - as a single group, which they aren't - for any and all missionary ideologies looking to make a killing in the conversion game.)
And on this line from the previous post:
Quote:Caste is likely 30k years old and well predates Hinduism.Surely the reference must be to endogamy's ancientry in India, rather than "caste". All ancient populations - and India like Africa and S America are prime examples (even Japan) - show endogamy even among its most tiny ancient communities. (Including such tiny communities, where you begin to think that intermarriages with other communities would have been to their benefit.)
It has been genetically found that the Irula tribe of snake catchers in Chennai is 30K years separated from the local tamil population.
But endogamy has the best of all reasons: preservation of the tradition of a nation's (or religion's) communities.
You see this even among brahmanas in various parts of India. Namboodiris only marry among themselves. A more obvious example is the Tamizh brahmana community of Iyers (who, like most Tamizh Hindus, are also found scattered across four southern states). Iyers have x numbers of subsets within them, who will Not intermarry between subsets. It's just not done. (Ancient instances of love-marriages - rare - excepted.) Nowadays, one or two very rare exceptions have been made by families themselves designing to get their progeny married. Otherwise it still does not happen. (Speaks for itself they don't marry brahmanas from elsewhere in Bharatam*, just like other brahmana communities of India would be like the Namboodiris and the Maithilis was it, and marry only within their own communities as well. *Again, love marriages excepted, and so too those Tamizh brahmanas who were more recently forced out of TN into as far as Mumbai and beyond because of DMK-christianism. And even some of the Iyers among the latter tended to still search out members of their own subset for their progeny to marry.)
This is not systematized - as would be meant with "caste" - since I doubt there are ancient nationwide Hindu laws specifying that a region's subset x of brahmana does not marry subset y. Yet because they have historically - for some time - been endogamous communities, with their own local subtraditions, and with an interest in preserving precisely their own ancestral traditions by not marrying out, there is this phenomenon even among communities that are otherwise regarded as having a higher possibility of intermarriage. (In theory, any brahmana may marry another where there are no gotra issues. In practice, I don't know any brahmana community that does that. And it's moreover the case that some simply won't be happy with it: not because it's not allowed by religion, but because it's tradition to preserve their own subcommunity and that of others.)
While some today may favour bringing in new heathen input - Taoists, Shintos :advertising: (themselves very endogamous, the advertising is meant in partial jest: I suspect their ancestors would want their kind preserved too) - one respects heathens' wishes for continuity.
Actually, this holds for so many Hindu communities. E.g. Indian media and activists pretend all the so-called "Dalits" are one group, as if they will intermarry or would have randomly intermarried in the past. Nonsense. They are not related, and even in the same states and localities these Hindu communities exist in their own individual very endogamous ancient communities*, just as brahmanas do.
(* And christians have documented=confessed this in their attempts at conversion.)
Hindu religion generally respects inclinations towards endogamy or at least leaves it alone, which is why those cases of endogamous subcommunities not mentioned in Hindu religion (scriptures) itself continue to exist. There are two things one is dealing with, which things sort of superimpose in society yet also lead partially-independent lives: rules on intermarriage in Hindu religion (there are some, whether universally adhered to, I wouldn't know) versus endogamy in India which is an ancient phenomenon.
Some missionary religions tend to want to do away with endogamy in order to create primary ties to the religion itself (and to some extent and for some time succeed in this, but often spin off new unnatural and highly casteist ones of their own), but most missionary ideologies eventually discover that India - as some other countries - is so set in its ways that the ideology has to be made to work around the status quo regarding endogamous groups if it wants to be more successful.
Christianism is an example of an ideology that actively tries and promotes both. When it realised it has to live with the Indian situation - go with the flow - it is seen to particularly target one community at a time for conversion.
Now rather than ever before is the time when the continuity of endogamy in India is uncertain. Loss of it is a threat* to individual communities and to the preservation of the local ancestral tradition of the subcommunities. There was that bit on Santals that Elst wrote of: that preservation of the community (by adherence to endogamy) was preservation of their religious tradition. It is actually true for other ancient heathen communities in India also. And that is the sort of thing that gets lost in modern changes. Not all change is bad and surely genetic variation is good, but change can have its flipside and the downside to this is quite regretable.
(*The threat is most obviously seen in the absurd uniformity enforced by the invented "Dalit" label: it wipes away the history of a whole bunch of rather unrelated Hindu communities and pretends they have no traditions, no sense of locality and no sense of attachment to any of it, that they're all one ideologically-unaffiliated bunch with no history of self or local community identity and are supposedly essentially "interchangeable". This way, the intention is to subordinate all the concerned into the concocted "Dalit" identity. Just so that this suddenly and artificially homogenised group can then thereafter be conveniently hijacked - as a single group, which they aren't - for any and all missionary ideologies looking to make a killing in the conversion game.)
Death to traitors.