Death is the most potent of all the sources of impurity and inauspiciousness in the life of a Hindu. This paper explores the different discourses on the nature of untouchability in Gujarat in order to delineate the relationship between the collective, permanent pollution of the lowest castes in the caste hierarchy, the so-called ‘Untouchables’, and their occupational specialization involving the disposal of dead animals and human corpses. It also analyses the inter-caste exchange of food and services at two levels: that between each of the untouchable castes and the other castes of a village, and that among the different untouchable castes themselves. The intra-caste sphere of temporary death pollution (sutak) incurred by individuals affected by the death of kin or affines is not dealt with here.

Le frisson que, fort de ses traditions chrétiennes et utilitaristes, un Français du xxe siècle ne manque pas d'éprouver devant chaque avatar de l'islam mondial n'est pas son seul fait. Ne voit-on pas déjà, vers 1867, un bouddhologue russe (V. P. Vasil'ev, 1818–1900) tenter d'attirer l'attention du monde chrétien sur le péril d'engloutissement dont il voyait menacé celui-ci par une Chine prête à sombrer, croyait-il, dans l'islamisme ? À l'époque où rien ne semblait arrêter l'expansion triomphante de l'empire russe à travers une Asie centrale endormie (Tashkent est conquis en 1865, Bukhara et Khiva en 1873), les grands soulèvements musulmans de l'Ouest chinois — au Kansu, dans l'actuel Ninghsia, au Yünnan — paraissaient, eux, lancés pour propager leur incendie d'une communauté musulmane à l'autre, jusqu'aux extrémités de l'empire chinois et au-delà. Les prédictions du savant russe se sont finalement avérées, dix ans plus tard, fausses de bout en bout. Noyé dans des flots de sang, l'islam cessait, à partir de 1876, d'être un problème pour le trône des Ch'ing [Qing]; et la Chine impériale, ainsi que la Chine républicaine qui allait suivre, était bien incapable de déferler sur le monde chrétien.

The image of the Ayatollah Khomeini is inextricably bound up with the popular conception of Islam today. This view of Islam as a religion of fanaticism and violence ignores the existence of a powerful mystical strand in the form of Sufism in which a philosophy of love is central. Between 1980 and 1981, as part of my doctoral research, I spent six months in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, living with the pupils of a Sufi sheik. This group had millenarian beliefs which acted, not as a means of violent insurrection, but rather as a means of reconciling the contradictory and often violent forces to which they were subjected.

This paper examines some of the moral meanings of aids, and argues that in addition to understanding aids in the context of the sexual counter-revolution, it also needs to be placed in the wider context of global economic and ideological crises, and the ‘New Right's’ struggle for hegemony. Denis Altman refers to aids as ‘the most political of diseases’ (Altman 1986, p. 11). A few years ago, Evans Stark pointed out that all epidemics are ‘social events’, even though they may appear as natural, random phenomena. This is because they have become the focus of struggles for control over resources (principally housing, medicines, and sanitation) (Stark 1977). Epidemics further tend to throw into relief deeply held social tensions and anxieties, which can become triggers for social reorganisation around traditional values. It is not difficult to see how this is the case with aids, which is infused in particular with tensions over sexuality and desire. In relation to this it is important to emphasize first, that sexual contact is estimated to be responsible for around two-thirds of reported aids cases amongst adults in the U.S.A. (Gracie et al. 1986), but it is not actually an exclusively sexually transmitted disease; and secondly that compared with other major causes of morbidity and mortality, aids remains a relatively rare condition in many parts of the world. It is sociologically significant though, that the two major routes of transmission, IV use and penetrative sexual intercourse, involve issues of control over body boundaries.

It is not peculiar to modern society that ideals of friendship express some of the ‘noblest’ potentials of human association. But an ideal of friendship so contrary to the forms of association that dominate the larger society is distinctive to our times. Explicit contract, rational exchange, formal division of labor, and impersonal institutions define the Great Society; by inversion, they also define those ideals constituting friendship understood at its morally best. Especially in the urban core of Western society, particularly its more educated sectors, friendships are judged of high quality to the extent that they invert the ways of the larger society. In this ideal, friendships are voluntary, unspecialized, informal and private. They are grounded in open-ended commitments without explicit provision for their termination—unlike contractual relations, prior stipulation of the conditions that legitimately end a friendship cannot be constitutive of friendship. In such an ideal, friendships are diminished in moral quality if terms of exchange between friends are consciously or scrupulously monitored, for this implies that utilities derived from friendships are constitutive, as in market relations, rather than valued as expressions of personal intentions and commitments.