Entailments and Markers of the Macrostatus Levels

Membership in a thar in itself may determine many features of an individual's life—occupation, aspects of marriage, residence, details of religious practices, and the various effects of the thar 's special culture and internal organization. Much of this may derive from the special history and distant origins of the thar itself and much from the effects of the thar 's incorporation, its way of being fitted into the macrostatus system. The thars are, in a way, the given raw materials thrown up by history on which the city-wide hierarchical system, the system of macrostatus levels, opportunistically builds. The macrostatus system is a means of ordering and making sense of its multitude of component units by ordering them into much simpler systematized groupings. That system is a typical Hindu "caste system," sharing the ideologies, the central metaphors of purity and impurity, the entailments of rank, and the rules for interactions among ranks that are found throughout South Asia. Such systems have been described frequently and at length, and we will simply sketch some of the entailments of Bhaktapur's twenty macro-

status levels here to indicate what Bhaktapur has maintained and emphasized in its Hindu orthodoxy.

Our sketch is concerned with the central rules of status ordering and their insisted-upon, publicly controlled, and sanctioned expressions. Deviations are internally controlled by family and thar councils, motivated by fear of loss of public respect and of economic and physical sanctions, and externally by people at superior levels who, if necessary, apply such sanctions. The rules concern—characteristically of Hindu status systems—mostly physical contact in relation to eating, drinking, and touching, and regulation of proper marriage. They also include for the lowest thar s rules regarding place of residence, and, until recently, clothing, decoration, and house type. In addition to these centrally important and carefully regulated behaviors there are many other important signs of status level—such as proper language and other behaviors indicating deference, respect, and adherence—and a host of more or less secondary or covert implications of status level, such as economic and educational opportunities, nutrition, differential vulnerability to disease, and many aspects of standards of living.

The centrally controlled behaviors are questions of traditional proper behavior, aspects of the dharma . The implications are often otherwise explained—as misfortune or the results of bad karma . The central system of regulations is highly conscious, involves clear rules and regulations, is based on pervasive and deeply felt ways of viewing the world, and is continuously symbolized and reinforced in ritual and symbolic forms. To anticipate later discussions, we may note here that the separation and ranking of the macrostatus system is considered a positive, dynamic, and activity-requiring process, the result of constant effort. People talk of "sending people to, and keeping them at" their particular level. Separation and ranking is in tension with other ideologies and experiences of blending and equality, and is not based on any theory of fixed, essential, "biological" differences justifying the hierarchy. It must be actively and constantly maintained.

The violation of central regulations is sanctioned, ultimately by the threat of expulsion of an individual, a family, or an entire thar from its status level. These regulations are central in that they constitute the hierarchical system, as the rules for the moves of chess pieces constitute the game of chess. The primary formula, which in itself implies all the separations and hierarchical rankings that make up the hierarchy is, as everywhere in South Asia, that boiled rice and certain boiled legumes (or "pulses") can be eaten only if prepared by a member of one's own

level or of a higher level. This rule is associated with ideas of impurity, which we will consider in chapter 11, and blends with other ideas about the status-derived purity of the provider of food, who must also be pure in other regards, not contaminated, for example, by contact with death or menstruation. From the point of view of any individual in the system there are two groups. There is an upper group including one's own level, from which one will accept boiled rice.^[43] Below any individual and distinct from and in opposition to the upper segment in which he or she and his or her peers are included are those groups who will accept boiled rice from the members of that segment, but from whom they will not accept boiled rice. Boiled rice is the basic domestic staple grain of the Newars, and the regulation involves an unavoidable, salient issue. In relation to the acceptance of food, of "being fed," the group to which an individual belongs, except for Brahmans, is always at the bottom of an upper segment.

The process of being excluded by those above and excluding those below effectively slices the hierarchy into its levels.^[44] The asymmetry has other implications, however. In the acceptance of rice, one is open to all above and to those at one's own level, and closed to all below. Thus, in terms of the acceptance of rice (which in the ideology of purity [chap. 11], implies the sharing of bodily substance), every individual is in the same "body" as all above (but always significantly at the lowest, most dependent position) and in opposition to all those below in rank. The refusal to take rice from those lower in status is one's own active (and conflicted) responsibility, supported by powerful ideas and feelings, many of which are related to dirt and disgust. But it is, in contrast, by the stigmatizing decision and action of others at superior levels, that our rice is rejected. Any given level gets carved out between its own strongly motivated restrictions toward those below it, on the bottom side, and something quite different, the rejecting behavior of other higher levels toward it on the top side. The solidarity of belonging to "one body" signaled to any individual by the downward flow of boiled rice is countered by an opposition, a radical breach in solidarity signaled by rejection of its upward flow. Looking down the system, one sees people who belong to, derive from, and depend on one, but whom one places on the other side of a barrier of disgust and pollution. Such complex asymmetries encourage in those given to reflection the kinds of intellectual complexity, the "sophistication," which, we have suggested in chapter 2, is an important distinguishing feature of Bhaktapur's people and the uses they make of its marked symbols.

While the differential acceptances and rejection of boiled rice carves out each successive step in the macrostatus system (as do the marriage regulations to which we will return), there are various other designations of differential purity that are arranged hierarchically and refer to particular status levels or groups of status levels, but which are not a regularly increasing and differentiating quality of each successive level. These mark hierarchy in a grosser way, and we may for convenience call them "classes of purity."

While (again typical of Hindu communities) a given group will not accept boiled rice from people in the levels below it, it will accept most other foods until a certain level is reached; at that level its members are considered so impure that no food, not even water, may be accepted from them. This group of people are called "Na^[*] calae ma ju phu(n), " people from whom water may not be "moved," or "Tiye nae ma tya phu(n), " people who should not be touched while you or they are eating. In the first phrasing, it is understood that as water is not acceptable, then no other food and drink is acceptable.^[45]

The first division, "water-unacceptability," produces a first large distinction among the levels in classes of purity. In the class of levels below the "water line" a second division is made to create a distinct lowest category, the "Tiye ma tya phu(n), " people who must not be touched—whether one is eating or not.^[46]

In previous sections we noted which levels are considered in each of these categories. There is some variation in the placement of the level of water-unacceptability, depending on the status of the higher, "purer" person. This is reflected in our "borderline" level, level XIII. Middle and lower levels differ in their conceptions of water-unacceptability even in relation to thar s below level XIII, but every thar agrees on the position of at least two thar s—the Jugi as water-unacceptable and the Po(n) as untouchable, and these two thar s are the present-day inheritors and foci of these positions.

The Brahmans and the upper-status Chathar families who model themselves on them add another distinction. They further divide the group from which they will accept food and drink. Within this group there is an upper strata, those groups from which they will accept all foods except boiled rice and pulses, the groups—as they are sometimes categorized—from which they will accept "salt." These are the Pa(n)cthar and above. Below this group is a second strata, people from whom they will accept all foods that are neither boiled (and therefore, of course, not boiled rice or pulses) nor salted. This group, named by con-

trast with the segment below it, is often called the "people from whom one accepts water." These are for the most part the farmers and "clean" craftsmen.

There were in the past many associated markers of sequential status relationships and classes of purity. One of the most enduring of these has been respect levels in language. In ordinary usage, there are three respect levels indicated in pronouns and in a very few nonpronominal lexical items (most saliently verbs for coming and going and for eating and drinking). People use a formal language in addressing or referring to others who are of higher status than themselves or in addressing or talking about equals in formal situations and a familiar language for people of lower status or for equals with whom they have intimate relations. The third level is a high-respect language used for addressing royalty, Brahmans (and, usually, Buddhist priests), and deities. There are also customs for proper greeting, for respect gestures, terms of respectful address, and more subtle behaviors of deference and authority, which respond to and mark relative hierarchy.

In the past a variety of associated regulations brought some, at least, other aspects of life into accord with purity rankings. Much of this was directed to the lowest most impure classes and facilitated their identification and separation. Thus, according to some of the chronicles, in Malla times members of the butcher thar had to wear sleeveless jackets; sweepers, butchers, and drum makers were not allowed to wear caps, shoes, or gold ornaments; and the sweepers had to live out of the city, and were not allowed to have the roofs of their houses tiled (D. R. Regmi, 1965, part I, p. 647). Many of these restrictions lasted through the Rana period and are remembered by older people but are not enforced now. But some such regulations, although not supported (and, in fact, illegal) under modern Nepalese law, persist. Thus Po(n) untouchables must, in fact, still live beyond the city's boundaries and in simple houses. Another very salient spatial marking of the major polluting thar s also has persisted. This is how far into the space of a house a person of a given polluting class can penetrate. Untouchables can enter only the cheli , the ground floor, which is conceptually considered outside of the house (chap. 7). Higher levels of unclean thar s can go further into the house, at least as far as the first floor above the ground level, the degree depending on the claims to purity of the individual household or its thar .

Foods eaten at different levels are frequently used to indicate status differences. Among the most salient are the foods that the Brahmans

refrain from eating—certain vegetables and the meat of certain animals (water buffalo and [previously] fowl),^[47] which are for others common Newar foods. At the other end of the scale is pork, which is eaten only by the lower segments of the unclean thar s, Po(n), Nae, Jugi, and the unclean Indo-Nepalese groups. It may be noted that pigs, like dogs, which are not eaten, are scavenging animals in Bhaktapur, eating, among other things, refuse of all kinds, including remnants of food in human feces. The low Newar groups further distinguish themselves from the Indo-Nepalese shoemaker and leatherworker group (Sarki), whom they claim eat the carcasses of animals that have died of natural causes, which the low Newar groups consider to be much more polluting than eating butchered pigs.

The separation and hierarchy organized by the macrostatus system entail rules about marriage, which make up part of the regulations for proper marriage (see chap. 6). Macrostatus regulations for a proper marriage depend on whether the marriage is a "primary" marriage—one contracted for perpetuation of the lineage.^[48] Primary marriages should be within the same status level.^[49] In those secondary unions in which the wife may be of a lower level, she cannot legitimately prepare boiled rice for her hushand, and their children will belong to neither the husband's thar nor to his level. They will either take the wife's thar name and level, or in rare cases be given a new thar name and placed at some intermediate level within the system. In these cases the man still is a member in good standing of his thar and can involve himself in its ritual, associational, and economic life—but his descendants no longer belong to it. If he were to marry or form a liaison with someone of an impure thar , however, he would be ostracized from his own thar and level.^[50] All primary marriages and the majority of secondary marriages are endogamous within any given status level. The controls here, somewhat like the controls on boiled rice-taking, are asymmetrical. People at any given level are concerned only that their women should not be given as wives to men at lower levels. Their active control is directed to the lower boundary. They have no ritual or social objection to taking wives from levels above them (and when such marriages do occur, they are vaunted), but those upper levels will not, if they can possibly prevent doing so, provide wives for them. It is through each level's concern with maintenance of its lower boundaries that a segmented system of status-level endogamy is created.

We should note that the actual regulations for accepting wives do not

correspond exactly to the regulation for accepting boiled rice, and does not "map" the macrostatus levels as exactly. In Bhaktapur there are subgroups within some macrostatus levels who consider themselves as a higher subsection, and will accept wives only from the same subsection, even though they will accept boiled rice from all thar s at the same general macrostatus level. Other considerations affecting exogamy may also limit marriage to only one section of the general commensal group, or may force people to seek wives outside the city. Thus, while rice acceptance is always directly related to hierarchical relations of macrostatus units in the city, marriage choice is not. Food and contact regulations are constantly at issue and are enforced and reenacted in every act of eating and food preparation; arranging a proper marriage, in contrast, is hardly a daily issue for any given individual.