Dumont, Louis (1911–98)
BRUCE KAPFERER
University of Bergen, Norway
Louis Dumont is significant in social anthropology primarily for his researches into the
ideological systems of India and Europe, on which basis he promoted a methodolog-
ical perspective for anthropology that was centered on comparison. In this approach,
Dumont set an original path that is concerned with overcoming the key methodolog-
ical paradox of the discipline whereby a particularistic relativism defeats the aim to
achieve general and universal understanding. Dumont addresses what he considers to
be the false universalism in much Western social and political philosophy and the social
sciences. He argues that their central concepts are deeply ideological, born in com-
paratively recent Euro-American history and in the circumstances of its colonial and
imperial domination. As such, their claim to universal understanding across the diver-
sity of human possibility, as displayed in the ethnographic record, is highly problematic
and is prone to create major distortions in analysis and theory.
Dumont is particularly critical of the individualism inherent in major modernist
and postmodernist approaches in anthropology and cognate disciplines, especially
economics and psychology. Their perspectives give paramount value to the individual
(the individual-as-value) as the basis of sociocultural orders, structures, and processes.
Dumont does not dispute that individual human beings are always involved in social
processes. This much is obvious. However, he maintains that in most American
and European philosophical thought and social science the individual is a key
value concept at the heart of any understanding of social relations and their systemic
organization. Furthermore, the individual-as-value (i.e., the individual is treated
as the total and primary unit of value to which social relations and structures are
reduced) is basic to regnant theoretical orientations. For Dumont the assumption
that the individual-as-value is of universal conceptual worth is contradicted in the
ethnographic record and motivates him to discover more powerful concepts that might
form the basis of an anthropology that can advance a general understanding of human
beings through its comparative work. Dumont decenters the individual-as-value,
demonstrating it to be a thoroughly cultural and historical construct largely born of
European and North American modernity, an observation supported by many other
scholars. Democracy in America (1945) by Alexis de Tocqueville was particularly influ-
ential for Dumont, including the development of his distinctive comparative approach.
Tocqueville demonstrated the exceptionalism of American democratic ideology that
in Dumont’s understanding has insinuated itself within many of the commanding
philosophical and social science perspectives of the contemporary modern era.
Hierarchy is Dumont’s central concept and not the individual-as-value. He uses
hierarchy in a special sense, not to be confused with Western common sense or its
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1815
2 D U M O N T, L O U I S ( 1 9 1 1–9 8 )
Figure 1 Louis Dumont.
Source: Courtesy of the RAI.
usage in much philosophy and social theory (Dumont 1980). Ordinarily hierarchy is
synonymous with terms such as rank, stratification, and inequality, which in Dumont’s
understanding are linked to modern individualist thinking. Dumont uses the concept
in accordance with its etymological derivation from the Greek hierarkhia, with its
religious, sacred connotations. Thus Dumont employs the concept of hierarchy in
a double sense as (1) holistic (a value that governs all relations in the totality) and
(2) one that does not treat the differentiated elements of relations as equivalent. Value
for Dumont is inherently hierarchical.
In hierarchy, difference (rather than similarity) is the principle of relational unity.
This is a dynamic unity, one in continual differentiation, involving the principle
whereby the dominant value encompasses that which is less valued, subordinate, and
contrary to it. Contrary to modern atomistic and individualist thought, where the part
is valued over the whole, the concept of hierarchy gives primacy of the whole over
the part, the whole being the defining and encompassing principle in a differentiated
universe of value.
Some of the raison d’être of Dumont’s orientation is indicated in Homo Hierarchicus
(1980) in his reference to Robert Hertz’s Death and the Right Hand (1960), a study that
addresses the virtually universal phenomenon of the value that human beings give to
the right hand over the left. These are never equivalent in value, the right hand, fur-
ther, usually being conceived as encompassing the left as its contrary and as being the
dominant value of orientation and body hexis.
Homo Hierarchicus remains Dumont’s best-known work, which demonstrates both
the significance of his hierarchical concept and its centrality within his larger project
D U M O N T, L O U I S ( 1 9 1 1–9 8 ) 3
to develop a rigorous comparative method for a scientific anthropology. This study
developed from his ethnographic research in India, first among the Kallars of south
India which resulted in his major monograph A South Indian Subcaste (Dumont
2001) and later in northern India. These specific studies led to his general study of
Homo Hierarchicus, which proposed a unified understanding of caste in India that
accounted for diversity within a still coherent system or set of organizing principles of
value. Hitherto ethnographic studies of India had emphasized heterogeneity around
nonetheless unifying ideas of Eurocentric conception that distorted the significance
of the ethnography. Critical dimensions of this approach was the treating of the India
cases (caste especially) as either manifestations of what Europe and America had
overcome (or were overcoming) or as exotic (or orientalized) exceptions outside
the Western experience. Both perspectives are challenged by Dumont who creates
a specific understanding of the coherence of the Indian materials that has general
importance for a genuine comparative understanding of human social processes. India
is more the rule than the exception.
Dumont describes the structural logic of the hierarchical relations between the
myriad jati (or communities or groups of caste) in India as governed by the hierarchical
structural logic conditioning the relations between the four varna categories (Brahmin,
Kshatriya, Vaisya, Sudra) as set out in the ancient Sanskrit texts. Paradigmatically, as
it were, the logic of the whole (as defined in the varna system) conditions the relations
between an enormous heterogeneity of caste groups or jati and their variations as
they are ethnographically observed across India. Dumont posited that the overarching
principle or encompassing value was purity defined in relation to impurity or pollution.
In caste terms this value was most evident at the extremes of the caste system, the
opposition of Brahmins to outcastes (Dalits). It expressed a thoroughly hierarchical
relation that is religious and ritualistic in form and in practice, the dominant value (the
Brahmanic) being defined by what it most radically excludes (Dalits) and in its relation
to the encompassing value of the whole. The purity/impurity or polluting relation (as
an encompassing of the contrary), Dumont argues, is a dynamic (and differentiating)
tension that operates throughout the system governing relations between castes (jati)
as well as the internal relations within castes.
Dumont’s approach to caste has been widely contested and his purity/pollution
opposition challenged (see Béteille 1986; Marriott 1976). Common criticisms include
his Brahminic bias and what is incorrectly regarded to be his orientalism (see Kapferer
2010), the latter obscuring his important exposure of Eurocentrism and its highly
problematic universalism. Dumont’s discussion of caste remains a classic, along with
its important recognition that the force of caste and its persistence in the face of
change is vitally connected to its ritual/religious dimensions rather than economic
materialism, which is the thrust of dominant Western understanding. In other words,
analysts should be careful of conflating caste with class while also being aware of
their interconnections, class processes exacerbating caste violence as a consequence
of the fact that the principles relating to one do not correspond to those of the
other.
Dumont employed his concepts of hierarchy and holistic encompassment (which
conceives the value of the part in relation to the value commanding the whole) to other
4 D U M O N T, L O U I S ( 1 9 1 1–9 8 )
aspects of Indian society, most notably kinship, demonstrating underlying continuities
across apparent differences (see Dumont 1983). His comparative method in the context
of India has proven to be powerful. This is so because it is a method that holds out
the possibility of establishing the limits to general assertions or understanding derived
through particular ethnographic study (see appendices to Dumont 1980).
It must be stressed that Dumont regards the concept of hierarchy to be of general
comparative value. However, other ethnography outside India is not grasped through
the Indian lens, as it were. This would simply be an inversion of his complaint that
Western universalist approaches effectively conceive India through concepts that are
thoroughly the product of European and American history and ideology. Indeed,
Dumont conceives of Indian ethnography as limiting cases of a general hierarchical
principle that can work out very differently in other ethnographic contexts. Hierar-
chy has general abstract dimensions and a great diversity of particular irreducible
forms so that, for example, hierarchical principles that govern kingship in Java
cannot be reduced to that in India or vice versa. Nonetheless, the two instances
can be grasped through the use of his methodological concepts of hierarchy and
encompassment.
In his important and later discussions of Western ideologies (especially evident in
nationalist discourse) and their emergence (see Dumont 1986, 1994), Dumont shows
how the concept of hierarchy continues in Western thought and practice through
historical transitions and transformations into the egalitarian and individualist
values of modernity. One of the major contributions of this later work relates to
the understanding of the totalitarian potentials of modernity. Philosophically and
theoretically, Dumont’s later studies provide a further raison d’être for his relativization
of major directions in Euro-American thought and specifically his attempt to
move beyond the binarism of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and also the oppositional
dialectics of Marxism, for which his concepts of hierarchy and encompassment are
crucial.
Overall, Dumont’s chief contribution is in his attempt to construct an authentically
comparative anthropology that is scientific. This demanded breaking with the hege-
mony of Euro-American philosophical and social science thought, which he achieved
by relativizing it and, more significantly, by attempting to establish a firmer ground
on the basis of which human practices and thought everywhere could be engaged to
the ongoing understanding of human being. The kind of anthropological science that
Dumont imagined was along the lines of the achievements of the mathematical and
physical sciences but without reducing anthropology to the mere importation of their
terms (he was impressed by Einstein’s theories of specific and general relativity and
imagined his own work along similar lines). Accordingly he aimed at creating a method-
ology that would enable anthropologists to test both the general and the specific worth
of their findings and to indicate the circumstances of their limitation.
SEE ALSO: Alliance Theory (Marriage Systems); Caste; Class; France, Anthropology in;
Functionalism; Hinduism and Jainism; India, Anthropology in; Lévi-Strauss, Claude
(1908–2009); Personhood, Self, and Individual; Purity, Pollution, and Systems of Clas-
sification; Race and Racisms; Totemism; Value
D U M O N T, L O U I S ( 1 9 1 1–9 8 ) 5
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Béteille, André. 1986. “Individualism and Equality.” Current Anthropology 27: 121–34.
Celtel, Andre. 2004. Categories of Self: Louis Dumont’s Theory of the Individual. Oxford: Berghahn
Books.
Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Dumont, Louis. 1983. Affinity as Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dumont, Louis. 1986. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dumont, Louis. 1994. German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Dumont, Louis. 2001. A South Indian Subcaste: Social Organization and Religion among the Pre-
malai Kallar. New Dehli: Oxford University Press.
Hertz, Robert. 1960. Death and the Right Hand. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kapferer, Bruce. 2010. “Louis Dumont and a Holist Anthropology.” In Experiments in Holism:
Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology, edited by Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt,
187–208. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.
Marriott, McKim. 1976. “Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism.” In Transaction and
Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, edited by Bruce
Kapferer, 109–42. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
Parkin, Robert. 2006. An Introduction to Two Theories of Social Anthropology: Descent Groups
and Marriage Alliance. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1945. Democracy in America. 2 vols. New York: Knopf.
