translation of Les quatre sens de la vie

[marcus.banks at anthropology.oxford.ac.uk]

>Dileep Karanth said:
>
>> Does anyone know of an English translation of the book "Les Quatre Sens
>> de la Vie" by Alain Danielou? The book, I hear has a discussion of the caste
>>>> system.

And Noel Evans gave full bibliographic details for the French edition. I
too have not heard of an English translation and more reliably neither has
my local copyright library. Another recent French work which definitely is
about caste is Robert Deli`ege _Le syst`eme des castes_ (Paris 1993, ISBN 2
13 045709 6) and there is a short review of this by Declan Quigley in
_Cambridge Anthropology_ 17.1 1994.

If it's works on caste in English that you are after then obviously Louis
Dumont's massive tome _Homo hierarchicus_ is the starting point (revised
English edition Chicago 1980). Declan Quigley's own _The interpretation of
caste_ (Oxford and New York, Clarendon Press, 1993) is the most recent
critique of Dumont and advocate of an alternative approach. Slightly older
and fairly even-handed is Pauline Kolenda's _Caste in contemporary India_
(California 1978). Ronald Inden's _Imagining India_ (Blackwell, Oxford,
1990) has a chapter on early European work on caste. These are mostly
anthropological works, but they are theoretical - there is a vast
ethnographic literature on caste.

Marcus Banks, Oxford