My friend and former work colleague Adrian Mayer, who has died aged 102, was a social anthropologist renowned for a 1950s study of an Indian village that showed how the caste system, while based on ancient religious beliefs and linked to the system of kinship, was quite separate from divisions based on wealth or class.
Adrian carried out his research in the village of Jamgod, Madhya Pradesh, in 1954 and 1955, while he was a research fellow at the Australian National University (ANU). His fieldwork there allowed him to participate in the daily life of villagers over an extended period and so to form fine-grained observations about how the caste system was integrated into people’s daily lives.
