(The book explores how this caste system emerged and why. ...)
The book explores how this caste system emerged and why. Starting with assumptions of the older origins of caste, the author traces fallacies long-held in dubious history, ethnocentrism and outmoded theory. Then using contemporary anthropological writings he proposes a fascinating scenario in which caste develops from an earlier clan structure that was previously labeled as an evolutionary 'dead end.' This radically new explanation provides keen insights and new explanations to those who would open themselves to new ideas.
(Singing with Sai Baba explores the implications and conse...)
Singing with Sai Baba explores the implications and consequences of the emergence in the West Indian nation of Trinidad and Tobago of a new, universalistic religion centered on the adoration of a living South Indian holy man - Sathya Sai Baba - as God.
From Field to Factory: Community Structure and Industrialization in West Bengal
(From Field to Factory explores the impact of a modern fac...)
From Field to Factory explores the impact of a modern factory on a Bengal agricultural village and the impact of the village's social and ideological systems on the factory. Morton Klass provides ethnographic data on life and work in both the village and factory and assesses theories of community, caste, village religion, and industrialization.
East Indians in Trinidad: A Study of Cultural Persistence
(The earliest (and perhaps the most thorough) community st...)
The earliest (and perhaps the most thorough) community study of East Indians, this work remains valuable in debates dealing with cultural persistence and colonial society. It represents a clear statement on a consequential social problem - the incomplete incorporation of the East Indian population into Trinidadian society.
Morton Klass was an American anthropology educator, consultant, and author. His researches were focused on the people of South Asia and their descendants in the West Indies.
Background
Morton Klass was born on June 24, 1927, in Brooklyn. He was a son of David A. and Millie (Fisher) Klass. He grew up in New York but his work focused on the people of South Asia and the West Indies, where he completed extensive research on-site.
Education
Klass graduated from Boys High School in Brooklyn in 1943, he held various jobs before joining the United States Merchant Marine in 1945. In his years at sea, he began to write short stories and to dream of a career as a writer of fiction, but a chance shipboard encounter with an Army Service Edition of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa led to his lifelong interest in anthropology.
Klass received a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Brooklyn College (now Brooklyn College of the City University of New York) in 1955 and a doctorate four years later from Columbia University, again in anthropology.
His interest in anthropology began with his reading of Margaret Mead's classic ''Coming of Age in Samoa'' while he was on sea duty with the United States merchant marine in the 1940's.
His dissertation, ''East Indians in Trinidad,'' dealt with the offspring of sugar plantation workers imported in the 19th century. His studies required extensive field work in the Caribbean and West Bengal, a state in India. He wrote about the caste system persisting in both regions, its prehistoric origins, its clash with economic development and the complex relationship between caste society and Hindu religion.
Morton made his mark as a teacher. He began his teaching career in 1959 at Bennington College, where he found the rusticated hyper-intellectual hothouse climate a bit sticky. By 1962 he was back in his natural habitat, New York, at Columbia University. Morton and his wife, Sheila Solomon Klass, an author of works of fiction, were always very much New Yorkers, and even the years spent across the Hudson River In Leonia, New Jersey, was something of an exile, from which they returned when their three children finished college. Sheila also loved the time they spent in Trinidad and West Bengal and based three of her books on their experiences in the field.
His studies required extensive fieldwork in the Caribbean and West Bengal, a state in India. He wrote about the caste system persisting in both regions, its prehistoric origins, its clash with economic development and the complex relationship between caste society and Hindu religion.
His other books included ''From Field to Factory: Community Structure and Industrialization in West Bengal,'' ''Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System'' and ''Singing with Sai Baba: The Politics of Revitalization in Trinidad.''
With Maxine Weisgrau, he edited ''Across the Boundaries of Belief: Contemporary Issues in the Anthropology of Religion.''
In 1965 Morton Klass became chair of Department ofAnthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University's college for women. Barnard had once been the department of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Gladys Reichard, and Margaret Mead, but it been dormant for some years when Morton began its revival and revitalization. He flourished at Barnard and Columbia as a respected, even beloved, teacher of graduate and undergraduate students over 35 years. Aside from his wise and gentle guidance on matters theoretical and editorial, he was able to communicate some of the joy that he felt in fieldwork and in knowing and talking about peoples and cultures. A remarkable number of Barnard students, inspired by Mort and his colleagues, went on to do graduate work in anthropology. Over the years, Klass held administrative positions as Barnard department chair (1965-1970, 1976-1978, 1986-1989) and director of Columbia's Southern Asian Institute (1982-1985).
Klass was an independent thinker who continued to see the value of the Boasianview of culture while also acknowledging the potential uses of these other approaches for particular problems.
Klass argued that the descendants of the East Indian immigrants, who had come from a number of different parts of the subcontinent, had managed to reconstruct a simplified, composite version of what their life had been like In the old country. Furthermore, they saw themselves as quite distinct from the larger body of (Creole) Trinidadian whose ancestors had been brought from Africa as slaves. His portrayal of reconstituted East Indian culture in Trinidad modified the older mechanical acculturation model and showed an appreciation of the persistence of culture and of a people's creative agency even under highly exploitative conditions like those of indentured servitude.
He pictures an "evolution" that is based on historical developments occurring throughout the South Asian region, not derived from some presumed general evolutionary determination or the working of laws of the capture of energy. At the end of his reconstruction, he says, "There is no quantum jump in all this, but only the easiest progression, seemingly the most minimal of transformations, but it takes us from the 'bear' to the 'barber,' from unstratified 'equalitarian' hunters and gatherers to the complex and stratified agricultural production system that is 'the caste system'."
Klass belonged to a generation of anthropologists who believed deeply that anthropology can help make humankind free. On the one hand, he looked on it as a science, but on the other, he was deeply concerned about justice and equality for all. He believed that anthropology holds a key to an understanding of human behavior and that key is the concept of culture. He also believed that a degree of cultural relativism is called for in our analyses.
He also believed that a degree of cultural relativism is called for in our analyses. Thus he resisted alike both Allen Bloom (Klass 1990) for making anthropology and cultural relativism his villains in The Closing of the American Mind and recent attempts to resurrect the concept of "race" and to undercut the notion of culture's power through recourse to poorly supported biological and genetic explanations for behavior. Early in his career he and his friend Hal Hellman, a science writer, published The Kinds of Mankind: An Introduction to Race andRacism (1971), directed to young readers, explaining cultural and biological differences. At the time he died, he had hoped to write a book that would take stock of what anthropology tells us about human behavior and why it should not be replaced by some combination of literary studies and sociobiology.
Membership
Klass was a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association, a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
American Anthropological Association
,
United States
Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
,
United Kingdom
Personality
Morton was also a talented actor and an important member of the Leonia (New Jersey) Players Guild. He played the demanding leading roles in such plays as "TheMan Who Came to Dinner" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" But Mort did not usually rely on others to write his lines. He was a vivid storyteller and a man of great wit.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Conrad M. Arensberg
Connections
Morton Klass married a novelist and professor of English Sheila Solomon on May 2, 1953. they had three children: Perri Elizabeth Klass, David Arnold Klass, Judith Alexandra Klass.