The cultural construction of the person in Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

This paper compares Bengal and Tamil ideas about kinship. The authors found surprising similarities in the Bengali and Tamil cultural construction of the person despite superficially radically different marriage rules in each region. They argue that Bengali and Tamil forms of imbedding the person in units of hierarchy and units of equivalence structures the variation in Bengali and Tamil understandings of marriage alliance. This focus on indigenous categories allows the discovery of basic Tamil and Bengali similarities that have been obscured by discussions that artificially demarcate domains of caste and kinship. This comparative effort both builds upon Louis Dumont's work and recognizes the continuing problem of how to analytically create and bound subsystems of meaning within a given cultural universe. The authors compare two regions in India (Bengal and Tamil Nadu) for which, according to them, they have detailed ethnographic knowledge. The comparison attempts to continue in the spirit of Dumont's discussion of kinship in north and south India by taking David Schneider's rejection of the genealogical assumption of kinship studies as an invitation to rethink Bengali and Tamil rules and kin terms.