[Anthropgrad] Seminar and Workshop

[Fay castles]

1. Wednesday 25 June: Seminar Anand Pandian (Anthropology, Johns Hopkins 
University )
2. Thursday and Friday 25/6 June Workshop: the Cultural Politics of 
Disadvantaged Castes (Program available on 
http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/news/)

Savagery, Civility, and Caste Subjects of Improvement in Rural South India

Anand Pandian, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins 
University

This paper suggests that distinctions of caste in India – long 
understood as an essential cause of “social anchylosis” or stiffening in 
Indian collective life – may also work to incite forms of moral and 
social transformation. I focus upon the social, moral, and political 
condition of the Piramalai Kallar caste in the southern Tamil country, 
governed as a “criminal tribe” by the colonial state in the early 
twentieth century. The paper outlines civility and savagery as contrary 
orientations of contemporary Kallar selfhood, suggesting that 
attributions of savagery are the preeminent means by which Kallars are 
imagined as underdeveloped selves, by others and by their own kith and 
kin. This discourse of savagery, I argue, serves as a powerful 
incitement to refine and work upon oneself. I describe its historical 
debt to an agrarian ideal of civility in the Tamil country, one that has 
long associated refinement with the practice of agriculture and those 
who engage in it. The paper discusses the genesis of these ideas in 
medieval tensions between marginal communities like the Kallars and the 
settled cultivating castes of the agrarian lowlands, and charts their 
place in the moral imagination of contemporary farmers in the cultivated 
countryside of the Cumbum Valley. The clearing of agricultural land 
here, I argue, is widely understood as a means of displacing savage 
places with civil environments. While this association marks Kallar 
selves as uncivil by nature, there is an ambivalence to this attribution 
that may also surface as an object of affirmation. In the domain of 
local politics, I suggest for example, savagery itself may emerge as a 
contrary ethos to cultivate and celebrate.

Wednesday 25 June 2008
2.00-3.30 pm
Seminar Room A, Coombs Building
ALL WELCOME

Anand Pandian is an assistant lecturer in Johns Hopkins University, his 
recent publications include: “Tradition in Fragments: Inherited Forms 
and Fractures in the Ethics of South India,” American Ethnologist, 
forthcoming (2008); “Devoted to Development: Moral Progress, Ethical 
Work, and Divine Favor in South India,” Anthropological Theory, 2008, 
8(2): 159-179 & “Pastoral Power in the Postcolony: On the Biopolitics of 
the Criminal Animal in South India,” Cultural Anthropology, 2008, 23(1): 
85-117








Dr Assa Doron
Research Fellow
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
ph: 61-2-6125-3870
fax: 61-2-6125-3023
email: Assa.Doron at anu.edu.au
ANU CRICOS # 00120C



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Fay Castles
Departmental Administrator
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
+61-2-612 52162  Fax: +61-2-612 53023
Fay.Castles at anu.edu.au
http://rspas.anu.edu.au/anthropology
ANU CRICOS Provider Number: 00120C
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