Citizenship as a caste marker: How persons experience cross-national inequality

Abstract

Extrapolating a recent conceptualization of caste from India to the global level, this article argues that persons experience cross-national inequalities via their citizenship as a caste marker. Rather than imagine castes as features of the fixed pre-modern Hindu social order, the article posits that castes are variable modern ascriptive social hierarchies subject to contestation and change in which economic and social distinctions are maintained through physical and symbolic violence. The study shows how, globally, nation-states exert physical and symbolic violence to normalize cross-national inequalities instituting a global citizenship-based caste order. This approach recognizes the importance of both global material relations emphasized by world-systems approaches and of symbolic structures central to global institutionalist approaches. The study also underscores persons’ positions and experiences confronting nation-states’ might. Power struggles concentrated on nation-states result in variability of global relations’ mutually reinforcing material and symbolic dimensions. The author uses caste features that appear ‘essential’ (i.e. ascriptive social closure, ‘ethnic,’ ‘religious,’ and ‘purity’ distinctions) as heuristics for identifying possible locations of caste construction and contestation, and identifies citizenship rules, nation-states’ territorial nature, nationalism, and visa, border, and naturalization rituals as such caste development sites. Vulnerable groups (stateless persons, refugees, migrants) both challenge the citizenship caste order and experience viscerally its physical and symbolic violence.

The relationships of family income and caste-status with religiousness: Mediation role of intolerance of uncertainty

“…Thus, because the positive religious relationship adds an approach-tendency to the approach-avoidance conflict of the lower castes towards the upper castes [85,86], this model explains the paradoxical behavior of the lower castes (i.e., behavior of not leaving the fold of Hindu religion, despite its support for the discriminatory caste system [85]). Moreover, because the caste characteristics, similar to India, have been reported in other countries [85], and are evident in cross-national affairs also [87], the present findings on the religiousness of caste may be of a wider crossnational significance.…”