The resilience of caste: Dalits, psychological essentialism, and intercaste marriage in the Himalayan foothills of Eastern Nepal

This thesis discusses caste-based discrimination in the Himalayan foothills of East Nepal. It is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork among the Bishwakarma (previously known as Kāmi), a Dalit caste whose traditional occupation is blacksmithing. While social practices that denote the Bishwakarma as ‘untouchable’ have largely disappeared from the public sphere, they endure in domestic contexts. In the face of this ongoing discrimination, the Bishwakarma deploy a number of strategies to improve how they are perceived by others. The first part of the thesis discusses these strategies as well as their limitations. The second part argues that a cognitive bias known as ‘psychological essentialism’ plays a significant role in the ongoing stigmatisation of the Bishwakarma and Dalits more generally. The extent to which this is the case has been overlooked in previous anthropological studies, and this has been detrimental to academic understandings of the phenomenon and to efforts to improve Dalits’ social status. Conversely, caste has largely been overlooked in existing studies of psychological essentialism, which have focused on gender, race and ethnicity. The recognition of the role that psychological essentialism plays in the social construction of caste leads to a different interpretation of two types of action that have been used to alleviate caste-based discrimination. One is based on identity politics; the other tries to reduce the essentialisation of Dalits by promoting mixing with non-Dalits. Promoting intercaste marriage between Dalits and others, a fringe phenomenon in Nepal, is an example of the latter; an analysis of the promotion of such marriages is offered in the last part of the thesis. Finally, a suggestion is made that recognising the role of psychological essentialism can lead to a more informed comparative study of discriminatory social systems across different cultural contexts

Homo anthropologicus: unexamined behavioural models in sociocultural anthropology

Inferences from ethnography in sociocultural anthropological arguments frequently rely on an unexamined model of the human mind and behaviour. Across a range of theoretical approaches, human thought and behaviour are implicitly understood as coherently following a single underlying cultural logic, described in terms such as of ‘ontology’, habitus, political strategy. We term this implicit model Homo anthropologicus, by analogy with Homo economicus. Both simplify human behaviour and can thus lead to errors in its interpretation. We examine examples of Homo anthropologicus in anthropological approaches to ontology, caste, state evasion, and habitus. We propose that such accounts are erroneous in light of the multiple cognitive systems involved in human thought and behaviour, discussed with close reference to dual process theory. Unlike Homo anthropologicus, Homo sapiens’ behaviour is frequently inconsistent. Whilst anthropologists have long acknowledged this is the case, in practice, as we demonstrate through our examples, inconsistency is frequently seen as a problem to be explained away rather than as a feature of behaviour to be accounted for in its own right. We therefore conclude by calling for a greater degree of methodological reflexivity when making inferences from ethnography

Why the extended mind is nothing special but is central

The extended mind thesis states that the mind is not brain-bound but extends into the physical world. The philosophical debate around the thesis has mostly focused on extension towards epistemic artefacts, treating the phenomenon as a special capacity of the human organism to recruit external physical resources to solve individual tasks. This paper argues that if the mind extends to artefacts in the pursuit of individual tasks, it extends to other humans in the pursuit of collective tasks. Paradigmatic cases of extended mind in the original literature are only particular manifestations of the more general capacity for collective intentionality, the unique power of human minds to be jointly directed at goals, intentions, or values. Because this capacity holds developmental and diachronic primacy over human-epistemic artefacts relations, the extended mind should not be seen as a special phenomenon, but as a central aspect of the human condition. The original extended mind thesis carried important implications for how the cognitive sciences should proceed. In a version of the thesis that accommodates collective intentionality, these implications would go far deeper than originally assumed

Why the extended mind is nothing special but is central

The extended mind thesis states that the mind is not brain-bound but extends into the physical world. The philosophical debate around the thesis has mostly focused on extension towards epistemic artefacts, treating the phenomenon as a special capacity of the human organism to recruit external physical resources to solve individual tasks. This paper argues that if the mind extends to artefacts in the pursuit of individual tasks, it extends to other humans in the pursuit of collective tasks. Mind extension to other humans corresponds essentially to the ‘we-mode’ of cognition, the unique power of human minds to be jointly directed at goals, intentions, states of affairs, or values (which, importantly, differs from having a ‘group mind’). Because the capacity for collective intentionality holds evolutionary and developmental primacy over human-epistemic artefacts relations, the extended mind should not be seen as a special phenomenon, but as a central aspect of the human condition. The original extended mind thesis carried important implications for how the cognitive sciences should proceed. In a version of the thesis that accommodates collective intentionality, these implications would go far deeper than originally assumed

Social Scrutiny in India: An online survey experiment to examine the effect of social scrutiny on identity-related behaviour in India

The seminar was conducted by Ms. Poorvi Iyer, a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics, on 16th June 2022 from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM in the seminar hall of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (GIPE), Pune (India

Enhancing crowd evacuation and traffic management through AmI technologies: a review of the literature

This document is a review of the burgeoning literature on the utilisation of AmI (Ambient Intelligence) technology in two contexts: providing support and enhancing crowd evacuation during emergencies and improving traffic management