Introduction: Thar And Macrostatus Levels

Bhaktapur, like Fustel de Coulange's Ancient City, has a social organization largely constructed out of bounded, relatively autonomous units, or "cells" that are combined in successively more inclusive ones. Households with their own deities and religious practices are joined in patrilineal extended families with their own deities and practices. Patrilineal groups are in turn joined in wider inclusive units called thar s whose members have a common surname. The thar s are in turn organized into what we will call "macrostatus levels."

There is an essential difference between thar and macrostatus levels and the smaller units. The latter, household and extended families—as well as some smaller units within the family and some groupings of extended families—are all more or less alike throughout the city and provide vital nested "structural units" for the city. There is an essential difference between a certain man's role as, say, father, husband, leader of an extended patrilineal family group, that is his role within one of the constituent cells of the city, and his urban role as a Brahman, farmer, or untouchable, a role that is of direct importance to the city as a whole. Such urban roles are ascribed through membership in—that is, through being born into—a thar .

In contrast to smaller constituent units thar s and macrostatus levels are differentiated so that their outputs are elements in the pattern of the

city. For the city organization it is the public functions of thar s—their outputs into the public city life and their external relations with and hierarchical position in relation to other thar s and groups of thar s—that is important, not their internal organization. From the point of view of the city as a whole, what goes on within the thar s is of no importance as long as their essential outputs of goods, services, and differentiated kinds of social persons are maintained. Internal practices and organization vary considerably from thar to thar , but as long as they produce their necessary public effects, internal matters are not only immaterial to outsiders, but unknown and in fact hidden from them. In the same way the still smaller nested units that compose the thar s must have their proper outputs into larger units, but their inner affairs are no business of others. In fact, hidden and secret knowledge, procedures, spells, and protective deities are often thought to be essential to the unit's effective output into larger units, and eventually into the life of the city.

Thus for the kind of city organization we are concerned with—the city at its own level as an organized and organizing mesocosm—the outputs and groupings and hierarchical organization of thar s are the relevant elements. The internal organization of the thar s, and particularly of their component kin-based units are the city forms that most closely affect the "private" experience and early education of the city's people. "Private" in Bhaktapur begins with the internal affairs of a thar , and takes a deeper meaning as action jumps from each unit to the next smaller—that is extended family, household, one or another internal household grouping, and finally to an individual's "self" and "inner thoughts." We will in the next chapter discuss some of the "sub-thar " organization. This will be necessary for discussions elsewhere of "private lives," but for the purposes of this book it will be an excursus.

We will be writing about a variant of a kind of South Asian social organization that is usually, of course, called a "caste system," a system that is said to have elements called "castes" and "subcastes" and various clusters of such units. It has seemed proper (for reasons that will follow) for our discussion of Bhaktapur's social categories to avoid such terminology and some of the assumptions that it entails and to use either local terminology, or neologistic terms. Thus we will call that aspect of the city's hierarchical organization that provides a pattern to the city as a whole the macrostatus system , and distinguish it from the systems of status and social organization within the smaller cellular units, the city's collection of microstatus systems. We have called the gross hierarchical

arrangements of thar s that make a difference to the city as a whole macrostatus levels . In contrast to these there are, for example, hierarchical arrangements of the thar s within a macrostatus level , which are of no concern to people outside of that level, as there are also status rankings within the groups that constitute thar s.

To return to our conceit of the city as a ballet, it is thar membership that assigns the roles of the dancers. There are other miniballets within the thar s and within their component units, but they are not our present concern, although we will say something about them in chapter 6.