Caste Systems in Conworlds

[Ares Land]

Yeah, that’s basically my understanding of varna. What I’m interested in is whether this is true or not.

I'm very inclined to trust it in any case. Piketty's case (which is ultimately a restating of the current academic consensus) is convincing and well-documented.

[zompist]

Piketty devotes a chapter to this in Capital and Ideology. IIRC, his thesis is that the British found the Varna system incredibly convenient; they coopted it, enforced it, and to a large extent rigidified it. Varna preexisted the British Raj but it was more of a theoretical thing; besides it wasn't consistent across all of India and there was a lot of local variation that the Brits completely ignored.

I love Piketty, but I'm very skeptical of this thesis. It strikes me as part of the "all bad things are European" meme that is extremely congenial to non-European nationalists and European leftists alike.

Varna goes way, way back, and it's consistently mentioned by authors over the centuries. As I noted, it's in the Rigveda, though in a late section. It's mentioned in the epics, by the Buddha, by Kalidasa. The Portuguese found it when they arrived, and gave us the name. Note that there are anti-varna statements by some sages, something that would hardly be required if the concept was "theoretical". Gandhi defended the varna system, which he would not be likely to do if it were a British-imposed system.

It's also hard to swallow that a system affecting all of society could be imposed on all of India in less than a century, yet be impossible to remove in 70 years of independence. (It took till 1860 before the Brits ruled half of India.) Recall that the British didn't even set up elementary schools. (This isn't to deny that the British made things worse— they always made things worse.)

(Another little test of Piketty's theory: Goa, and for that matter Puducherry— areas the British could hardly fuck up since they belonged to other European powers.)

Also, let's not over-exoticize: varna is class, with religious sanction. The exact same thing can be found in Aristotle, or China, or medieval Europe; classes of clerics, warriors, and commoners were reflected in both ideology and government in France. And the idea that the upper estates are endowed by God as superior human beings is hardly restricted to India. The idea of an "untouchable class", under different names, appears in the US, in Japan, in France.

None of this means that there isn't nuance in the varnas by region or time. I've already noted that Manu should be read with a truckload of salt: he was writing in a time when kings were mostly "heretics" (i.e. Buddhists or Jains), and he longed for a world where everyone deferred to brahmins. Any class system leaks, especially over 3000 years: high-ranking families end up destitute, commoners make it to the throne or get rich. The bhakti movement (which more or less took over or reinterpreted Hinduism) was non-brahminic in origin.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I’m thinking about giving the Tim Ar a caste system. The initial divisions I am thinking of:

- Nobility: These guys run the empire, are related to someone who does, operate a sufficiently-sized business empire, or are just really lucky.
- Aristocracy: Landowners originally, this caste expanded into fields such as tax collecting, construction, engineering.

I think I would normally call the second one "gentry" rather than "aristocracy", though traditionally a gentleman does not have a profession.

- Hawaladars: The hawaladar caste is tasked with handling monetary transfers on its most basic level, with trust, reputation, and family name being pivotal. Their scope has expanded to cover things such as notary services, banking and finance more generally, legal representation, and negotiation or arbitration.

Essentially a banker and lawyer class, then? How would these have split off from the rest of the merchants? And why are the legal ones not lumped in with the nobility or the class just below them?

- Military: Pretty self-explanatory, though the scope is here extended as well (for instance, bounty hunting).
- Priesthood: Largely ceremonial nowadays; back in the day, this was a fundamental division of society in the Tim Ar-O cultural complex. This one also covers medical professions. Educators and counselors are further permissible career choices.

Medical professionals as an evolution of the clergy is an interesting, but I think sensible, choice.

- Scribes: If it involves writing and recordkeeping.

If the society has computers, I might expect this class to have been wholly absorbed into another, unless its persistence is merely ceremonial?

- Merchants: Big business, small business, courier services, logistics, and, for some reason, a lot of computer-related professions.

No technocratic class, then? Not that this is entirely unrealistic — rigid systems tend to be at least somewhat behind the times on a good day.

- Commoners: A lot of everything else falls under this umbrella, particularly trades and agricultural professions.
- Vulgar commoners: Like above, except less prestigious and more “dirty”.

I must wonder what's left for them to do; I suppose most menial tasks that aren't delegated to "untouchables", various forms of "unskilled" labour, and the like?

- Untouchables: If you could expect Mike Rowe to film a segment about it, chances are it gets filed in this bin.
- Serfs/slaves: This is something I’ve been debating. I am trying to de-Mary Sue the Tim Ar, but I wonder if this would be too much or too far. Slavery and indentured servitude exist on my conworld (it’s supposed to be a something of a crapsack world).

Unfortunate, but expected of a "Crapsack World"

Movement between castes is difficult, though restrictions on career would have been relaxed quite a bit in the run-up to the time of the story—so someone from basically any caste could join the armed forces (though not as an officer), for instance, and the Scribal and Merchant classes have significant overlap. Choice of profession is, however, still limited by one’s caste.

I think relaxation is inevitable, especially the more specialised people become — somebody born in one caste might really be suitable for another, and allowing them to languish isn't very useful to society; perhaps a quasi-Confucian approach, with caste being changeable based on some sort of examination or decree, might evolve?

I feel I should also mention that the Tim Ar have a skin group system. One is considered to be part of both the mother’s and the father’s skin groups at once, and this system is mostly exogamous (a few later additions to this classification scheme allow endogamy, however). I’m not sure if there are other prohibitions due to historical animosity or something.

What is a "skin group"?

I would also like to ask, since this empire is large: When an empire with a caste system annexes some other population, how are they integrated into the caste system? Do they shoehorn them into existing categories? Call them all their own group? Some other strategy?

I think that will depend on a number of factors. If the culture is already fairly similar, and the annexation is fairly peaceful, I expect the absorbed peoples will continue on as they were before (this will make for the easiest and smoothest transaction); if the people of Tim Ar are, however, more vindictive, they might throw everybody into commoners, vulgar commoners, and untouchables, if they feel the need to crush resistance or otherwise humiliate a conquered people. There's also a question of who has useful skills in this new culture, and how they view the enslavement of conquered or absorbed people. If the world is very Crapsack, I would expect people who resist assimilation might be indentured or given as slaves to members of the caste whose skills they best fit, with those who assimilate and accept the new order being treated better than those who don't. Making them their own group (especially if the population led a subsistence existence) or lumping them all into whatever group is connected most with their subsistence activity would also probably work.

If I were to make all those thoughts shorter, it would probably be, "I think this would probably be done on a case-by-case basis, depending on the method of assimilation and skill level of the absorbed or conquered people."

Have any of you on the board incorporated some sort of caste system into your settings? If so, how did you do it?

The culture on which I primarily focus in my own world has vestiges of an aristocracy-gentry-commoner system, but, other than the structure of the State still being a monarchy in which the king has considerable, but not absolute, authority, the aristocracy has had nearly all of its power eroded away (though the titles remain, and a few of them carry some measure of ceremonial role), and the world generally being an Anticrapsack, nobody's really all that worried about it now. This was, of course, not always the case — the language spoken there has a massive amount of obsolete polite and honorific forms (some of the entries on pronouns list a huge number of "polite" variants), and the first generation (a long time before the narrative present, though I haven't determined how long yet) of commoner children to receive public education were called the "genteel generation", having been fairly effectively "gentrified" by education (this actually had some influence on the modern pronominal paradigms — some of the humble forms used by schoolboys became generic, pushing out the older plain forms — the archaic first-person singular pronoun ends up shifted to a rude second-person one).

Also, it has no sign of clergy anywhere. This is mostly a function of real-life writing the plot — I'm not a great fan of religion, and so not very good at inventing religions that don't feel like parodies. The setting also has heavy fantasy elements, so any sort of "supernatural" being doesn't really require "faith" for people to interact with it if it wants them to.

[Ares Land]

Also, let's not over-exoticize: varna is class, with religious sanction. The exact same thing can be found in Aristotle, or China, or medieval Europe; classes of clerics, warriors, and commoners were reflected in both ideology and government in France. And the idea that the upper estates are endowed by God as superior human beings is hardly restricted to India. The idea of an "untouchable class", under different names, appears in the US, in Japan, in France.

Absolutely. And the same thing applies to jati.

We underestimate the extent to which profession was hereditary in Europe. As an example: I did a bit of genealogical research. The earliest ancestor I can find a trace of arrived in France in the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession. He was a coal miner. All his male descendants were coal miners, until the 1950's. Of course they married daughters of coal-miners. Before modern transportation, who else were they going to marry? and there was besides, a question of class. They would have seen marrying peasants as beneath them, and the daughter of a rentier or a business owner would never have married a coal miner.

Craftsmen belonged to a corporation -- the system, in fact, found ways to survive the Ancien Régime. Daughters of craftsmen married craftsmen of course, and often enough within the same corporation. These were the people the family interacted with, and of course it was good for business.

From a conworlding perspective, it wouldn't take much of a nudge to turn this into a full-fledged jati system.


(Even today, I'd be curious to see how many, say, military brats marry other military brats.)

[Raphael]

And it should be noted that parts of the old guild system (basically Europe's version of caste) still survive among craft workers in Germany - you no longer have to be born into a guild to get trained in its craft, but the formal structures still exist, and still regulate the professions in question.

Oddly enough, medieval Germany's version of the "untouchable" group were the executioners, the hangmen. You'd think that a society that had the death penalty for pretty much everything down to petty theft would treat carrying out death sentences as a perfectly respectable profession, but no: among other things, really old German churches still sometimes have entries that were originally separate entries for executioners, so that "respectable" people wouldn't have to use the same entries as them.

[Ares Land]

The executioners were likewise a separate and despised class in France. They did have a few privileges.
It feels very weird, but it has an echo in the present day. I met a few cops and prison guards outside their professional capacity; all of them hid their profession until they got to know me a bit.

Several places in France had a caste of untouchables. Sometimes with separate church entrances. No one really knows why. In both cases there's a connection to profession (in Brittany they were rope-makers, in the Pyrénées carpenters) and to disease (in both cases they were assimilated to lepers).
Again, if this sounds weird, I'd like to point out that we post-moderns treat the Roma in much the same way.

[rotting bones]

I vaguely remember the Cagots being descendants of former heretics.

[Ares Land]

That's one of the possible origins, IMO not the most credible one (there was very little, if any, Cathar activity in the provinces were cagots were found.) We really have very little data on their origins.

[Torco]

I wonder if the ancient chinese, or africans, or indonesians had such hereditary, endogamous occupational clans. seems likely tbh

[Vijay]

I mean, isn't that basically what a monarchy is, for example? And all of those had monarchies.

EDIT: Also, I actually learned about the Cagots from my advisor in his Romani Studies course for undergrads (when I was taking it in my first year as an undergraduate university student).

And it should be noted that parts of the old guild system (basically Europe's version of caste) still survive among craft workers in Germany - you no longer have to be born into a guild to get trained in its craft, but the formal structures still exist, and still regulate the professions in question.

South India at least used to have merchant guilds, too.

[Ares Land]

IIRC the Confuceans divided between gentry/scholars, craftsmen, farmers and merchants. Interestingly the merchants were at the bottom (but it seems merchants are always seen as a little shady.)

West Africa, more specifically the cultural area of the Mali Empire had castes too, including blacksmiths, hunters, farmers, various clans of craftsmen and griots (~ bards.)

The Nahuas had calpolli, basically communes / villages / neighbourhoods, but several of these were specialized and worked as endogamous guilds. You can make Nahua society fit a noble / commoner / craftsmen / merchants four-fold division without too much of a stretch (again, interestingly, the merchants are again sort of despised.)

Indonesia was well within the Indian cultural sphere so it seems likely they would have their own version of castes? The Balinese are mostly Hindu, besides.


EDIT: Oh, an amusing Sino / Aztec parallel: if I'm not mistaken, the merchants are called shāng, same as the Shang dynasty. In Nahuas the craftsmen are tōltēcah, 'Toltecs'. Both civilizations naed one of their social divisions for an ancient, vaguely mythical civilization.
(The merchants were called pōchtēcah in Nahuatl which also sounds like an ethnic name but isn't, AFAIK.)

[Creyeditor]

Indonesia was well within the Indian cultural sphere so it seems likely they would have their own version of castes? The Balinese are mostly Hindu, besides.

Talking about Indonesia as one homogenous cultural area is always a fallacy. Even Java was in the cultural sphere of several Indian cultures, Southern Chinese (recently also Northern Chinese) traders, Arabic traders and later the Dutch of course. IIRC, the present day categorization for native is mostly royals vs. low class/villagers vs. everyone else. There might be a gentry class that I am not aware of.

[Raphael]

Indonesia was well within the Indian cultural sphere so it seems likely they would have their own version of castes? The Balinese are mostly Hindu, besides.

Talking about Indonesia as one homogenous cultural area is always a fallacy. Even Java was in the cultural sphere of several Indian cultures, Southern Chinese (recently also Northern Chinese) traders, Arabic traders and later the Dutch of course.

This is a bit off topic for this thread, but this reminds me of my pet idea that in terms of cultural geography, the world is mostly a collection of overlapping overlaps.

[Pedant]

(The merchants were called pōchtēcah in Nahuatl which also sounds like an ethnic name but isn't, AFAIK.)

From what little Nahuatl I know, wouldn’t that mean something like “person/people from the smoky place”?

[Ares Land]

(The merchants were called pōchtēcah in Nahuatl which also sounds like an ethnic name but isn't, AFAIK.)

From what little Nahuatl I know, wouldn’t that mean something like “person/people from the smoky place”?

Indeed!

My Nahuatl dictionary says that there was a place called Pōchtlān south of Xochimilco, and a merchant calpolli in Tlatelolco called Pōchtlān. So perhaps it's an ethnic name after all.

[Pedant]

I admit, castes per se hadn’t really appealed to me as a thing I wanted to add to Ajjamah. I can see myself developing them for the Glass Empire, maybe Reogal, and having a pyramid formation (aha) for the Army of the Dead. But the whole varna-jati thing directly? Not so much.

There are alternatives, after all. To the Zanguenese, for example, I gave a dodem system similar to the Anishinaabe Up Here (although so as not to worry about cultural appropriation I prefer the term phratry)--five groups, for scouts/hunters/herders, healers, teachers, smiths/masons, and messengers, spread out across the various tribes--and let it develop for a couple of thousand years. The end result is a mishmash of different clans functioning almost as mini-guilds, jockeying for control of the cities first as monarchs and then as senators. It runs the gamut from Kyo8 Lu7 (which has basically done away with the phratries and focuses on the merits of individual clans, whose members may have any profession they choose) to Dô Zang (five separate branches of society organized into internal tiers, so one’s clan is separated from those of one’s phratry by class) to Chom Gohn (where the Paragonist monasteries and the Brawl act as two separate constitutional assemblies and the phratry is highly augmented by the guilds, themselves something of a cross between phratries and modern unions), and everything in-between in the five other states.

What I did not want was to maintain the rigidity of the varna, and given the Gifts I gave to the Zanguenese (the ability to turn into nearly-indestructible glowing red monsters when threatened) it seemed logical that the distinctions in caste should be professional rather than based on some knowledge of intrinsic rank in the universe. All five phratries are equal to one another, all serve a purpose within a functioning society, and all are dominant in their specific field. They take their turns at playing the leader, but frankly there’s too much at stake for the individual clans to let one phratry establish a hierarchy. And because the Zanguenese are matrilineal, one inherits one’s phratry from one’s mother; one is also forbidden from marrying within one’s own phratry, which has helped in keeping them on equal terms.

(That’s not to say it didn’t happen elsewhere; the same phratries that gave the Zanguenese their way to democracy also provided the foundation for the rigid Kagamai class system. The only reason they could get rid of it was by being wiped out, and the modern-day Cancais only maintain the barest rudiments of the system on account of being shapeshifting nomads. The patrilineal Hercuans simplified the system into professions rather than phratries once they came into contact with the Truzithan city-states. Among the Grot-Chom of the High Plateau the phratries became ritual roles in the community, with laxer rules about who could become what and even some switching over the course of centuries-long lives.)

Superficially the Salvians could be said to have a caste system; they certainly do keep their kings, and there’s a pariah caste of sorts down at the bottom. But that’s more to do with the amount of integration one has into the magical infrastructure of the country. The majority of folk trace their clans back to the inventor of a spell, even if they aren’t direct descendants (let’s just say there were quite a few adoptions). The monarch class is ancient, true, but lineages have risen and fallen across the centuries, and people have never had to follow their kings and queens; in modern Salvi they’re mainly ornamental, pushed back by the priesthood and by the gurus (and indeed by the gods themselves, who tend to be an accurate reflection of what the majority of their worshippers want on a particular issue). And the pariahs (jusah, singular jus) are more akin to the nishadas--those living within Salvi but outside Salvian influence, who haven’t taken the ganthu-oath and thus aren’t integrated into the aforementioned magical infrastructure.

(Sorry about the wall of text, didn’t realize how long it was!)

[Ketsuban]

What is a "skin group"?

It appears to be the Australian Aboriginal English term for the kinship system generally called "moieties".

[FlamyobatRudki]

What is a "skin group"?

It appears to be the Australian Aboriginal English term for the kinship system generally called "moieties".

a moiety is devides everything in twain,
skin group aboriginee term usually devides things into four.

Addendum: after looking it up i'm more confused.

[Foolster41]

I'd thought that the Salthans would likely have a caste system of some sort, at least during the imperial era, but I'm not sure what that'd look like exactly.
Possibly divided into:
Royalty, Nobility, Military, Priesthood, Craftsman, Peasantry.
But I'm not entirely sure the restrictions exactly of each caste, or how much thus would change or persist after they bring down the royal regime and become a democratic republic. (no Royal or noble classes effectively at least legally, but would there still be special privileges for military and priest class? I'm not sure)

[Nachtswalbe]

How would a modern state deal with non-religiously-sanctioned caste systems like shinōshoko?