Respect Your Neighbor as Yourself: Neighborliness, Caste, and Community in South India

Abstract

AbstractThis essay explores a global and existential problem—how ordinary people live and contend with historically deep subordination, humiliation, and exclusion—through an examination of the everyday lives of formerly untouchable caste Dalit communities in Kerala, India. I look at this through the lens of neighborliness: how people discuss how theylive togetherwith other castes and classes in small town and rural Kerala. Their continuing struggles with and experiences of humiliation and subordination must be placed within the historical context of Kerala, where deep inequality previously constituted every social relationship, and where the communist movement and other important social and political transformations have radically transformed living conditions and provided new languages and possibilities of equality within the official public sphere, if not the household. Drawing from the anthropology of ethics and engaging with philosophical discussions of living with others, I scrutinizeneighborlinessas an ethical landscape for Dalits living in new kinds of neighborhoods produced by political and social transformation. In doing so, I also reflect upon the ongoing conversations and interactions within which, for Dalits, respect, dignity, and worth are at stake. The essay also suggests new ways of understanding publics that are neither private nor part of the official public, but rather are networks of houses within rural neighborhoods—what I call “private-publics,” which are constituted through gendered caste relations.