Q.Summarise the social anthropological definition of caste.

Ghurye's most lasting contribution to the sociological study of caste was not a theory of its racial origins but a precise, six-part institutional definition -- one built from the classical textual tradition and meant to give later researchers a common, workable standard against which to check what was actually happening to caste in practice. The first feature is segmental division: caste divides society into closed, mutually exclusive compartments, membership in which is fixed entirely by birth, with no other route in or out. The second is hierarchy: every caste stands strictly above or below every other caste, at least as a matter of principle, so that in theory (if not always in practice) no two castes are ever equal. Third, caste restricts social interaction, especially around food, through elaborate rules of purity and pollution -- rules that reach their harshest expression in the practice of untouchability, where even physical touch is treated as polluting. Fourth, these principles of hierarchy and restricted interaction carry over into differential rights and duties between castes, covering not just religious practice but everyday secular life as well. Fifth, caste restricts occupation: like caste membership itself, one's traditional occupation is hereditary, so that at the level of society as a whole, caste functions as a rigid, birth-based division of labour. Sixth, caste restricts marriage through the paired mechanisms of endogamy (marriage only within one's own caste) and exogamy (rules on which even-narrower groups, such as one's own lineage, one may not marry into) -- together, these rules are what actually reproduce the caste system generation after generation. …