Glossary

This chapter's glossary gathers six terms that recur across the profiles of Ghurye, Mukerji, Desai and Srinivas. Administrator-anthropologists were British colonial officials of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- figures such as Edgar Thurston, William Crooke, Herbert Risley and J.H. Hutton -- who combined their government duties, especially census and survey work, with serious anthropological research, and some of whom went on to build anthropological reputations after retiring from service. Anthropometry was the specific branch of anthropology they relied on: the measurement of the human body, above all cranial volume, head circumference and nose length, used to sort populations into supposed racial types.

Two terms describe how cultures relate to one another over time and how marriage is regulated within a group. Assimilation names the process by which a smaller or less dominant culture is gradually absorbed into a larger one, until it no longer survives as a separate, visible way of life. Endogamy is the rule that marriage must take place within a defined social or kin group -- caste endogamy, where a person may only marry within their own caste, is the most familiar Indian example. Its counterpart, exogamy, works the opposite way: it marks out a group within which marriage is forbidden, so that a partner must be found outside it -- common instances include the prohibition on marrying close blood relatives (sapinda exogamy), members of one's own lineage (sagotra exogamy), or people from one's own village or region. …