SILVERBERG, JAMES (ED) (1968), Social Mobility in the Caste System in India (Book).

The article focuses on the book "Social Mobility in the Caste System in India. An Interdisciplinary Symposium," edited by James Silverberg. In the book, author aim to further an understanding of the nature, extent and significance of social mobility in a caste system and to uncover the mechanisms and determinants involved. The book offers a review of the sociological concern with social mobility in the caste system as a general set of processes. A set of four papers presents and evaluates evidence concerning social mobility, based in three instances on recent first-hand observations and in the fourth on data extracted from the medieval period by the techniques of the historian. The first two papers are the products of anthropological field research in rural communities: a South Indian case by researcher Edward B. Harper, who combines ethnographic and ethnohistorical methods; a North Indian case by researcher William L. Rowe, who gathered his ethnographic data not only among the Caubans of the village in which he lived but also from their city-dwelling caste fellows, the politicians and other professionals whom he interviewed in Bombay, India and several urban centres of North India.