Razib Khan – Page 34 – Brown Pundits

Caste – bred to the bone!

Razib Khan · July 30, 2020 · 80 comments

Kushal Mehra and I had a discussion on the Brown Pundits podcast about caste. I will post for Patrons today and push it live tomorrow. I want to review a few things from my perspective on this issue related to what we talked about.

– The paper The promise of disease gene discovery in South Asia highlights a fact: jati has a very strong genetic reality. The stylized fact is that caste endogamy has been strong across southern Asia for 1,500 years. Genetically you can have two castes in the same village in Andhra Pradesh who are as distinct as people from Finland and Sicily.

Additionally, jati is not arbitrary. Brahmins across India may not be closely related, but they tend to have more “Ancestral North Indian” than their non-Brahmin neighbors, on average (true everywhere except for the Northwest of the subcontinent).

– Kushal asked if jati varna was an ESS. I have suggested that caste fragmentation made it harder for non-Indians to take over and assimilate Indian society. But, it is not the only ESS.

– The main contrast I give is to China. People who can read classical Chinese (which was the norm in the early 20th century) can still read oracle bones from the Shang dynasty 3,400 years ago. This is a civilization with continuity and integrity.

The Chinese are a population that has managed to absorb other groups and do it without caste endogamy. Rather, like Europeans, Chinese genetic variation is a function of geography, not class/caste. In fact, the Chinese never developed a blood nobility like Europe. The basis of Chinese civilization has unapologetically been the peasantry.

– In The WEIRDest People in the World Harvard’s Joe Henrich makes the argument that the Western Christian Church’s destruction of extended family networks led to the rise of the West. I won’t recapitulate the argument which I’ve outlined elsewhere. But the idea is rather persuasive.

It seems that the hostility and skepticism toward caste from some on the “Hindu Right” really has to do with Indian nationalism. Jati varna was a reasonable institution in a pre-modern context, but it doesn’t take a genius to understand that national cohesion is reduced when people view themselves as members of a “community” first and foremost, and not a nation-state.

From the traditionalist side, the idea that jati varna is a great functional system is really not the point. Let’s be frank: people are invested in their particular traditions and their purity. The rest is commentary.

Browncast Episode 115: Sean P. McCarthy, Come the Revolution!

Razib Khan · July 30, 2020 · 1 comment

Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!

You can also support the podcast as a patron. The primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone else. This website isn’t about shaking the cup, but I have noticed that the number of patrons plateaued a long time ago.

On this podcast Razib talks to someone from the economic Left or “Dirt Bag” Left, Sean P. McCarthy. McCarthy’s Twitter account is very funny, especially in the potshots he takes at the woke-Left. But contrary to what one might think, he has very strong and serious opinions on economic matters that challenge what he perceives to be the neoliberal consensus.

Browncast Episode 114: Brahmin Bannon

Razib Khan · July 29, 2020 · 4 comments

I would though appreciate more positive reviews! Alton Brown’s “Browncast” has 30 reviews on Stitcher alone! Help make us the biggest browncast! At least at some point.

In this episode, we talk to Indian Bronson. The easiest way to explain who he is is that he’s an Indian American Brahmin who is a practicing Hindu vegetarian, who also happens to be on the same ideological wavelength as Steven Bannon.

A data scientist by data, and shitposter by night.

Browncast Episode 113: Richard Hanania

Razib Khan · July 28, 2020 · 2 comments

I would though appreciate more positive reviews! Alton Brown’s “Browncast” has 30 reviews on Stitcher alone! Help make us the biggest browncast! At least at some point.

In this episode, I talk to Richard Hanania. By heritage a dhimmi from the Levant, Hanania’s primary focus is on foreign policy. We discuss the “blob”, the importance of path dependency in American foreign policy commitments, and the impact of sanctions on Iran.

We also discuss his upbringing as an Arab American, and what it’s like to be right-of-center and an academic in 2020.

He has a very interesting and contrarian Twitter account.

Note, if you are a patron, I’ve already posted the interviews of Indian Bronson and Sean P. McCarthy.

Food between cultures

Razib Khan · July 25, 2020 · 46 comments

Recently I read a piece on Indian cuisine from a “woke” perspective, Reclaiming Indian Food from the White Gaze: The same food I was teased for as a kid has become trendy and divorced from its cultural origins. Now, I’m using my cookbook to change the narrative. Obviously I disagree with the ideology interlaced throughout the piece, but the author is a pretty good writer, and a lot of the illustrations and experiences “ring true” to me. You could strip out a lot of the jargon like cultural appropriation and gaze, and the piece would be a fine read.

For example, the point that white women cooking “exotic” food is “trendy” and marketable in a way it isn’t when immigrants or nonwhite people do seems likely, and something I’d rather like explored more.

That being said, the implicit idea that people “own” culture and that the boundaries are sharp and strict seems to me wrong-headed ultimately. Synthesis is as old as human-kind…my family’s cuisine includes red chilis, potatoes, and tomatoes. Just to give one example.

I’d be curious what Indian readers think, as the piece is obviously inflected by an Indian American lens.

Addendum: I’m from the far east of Bengal, but shrimp is my favorite food.

Open Thread – 07/25/2020 – Brown Pundits

Razib Khan · July 25, 2020 · 402 comments

So How Asia Works is very discounted on Kindle in the USA. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it.

In light of the increased comment activity on this weblog, I ask commenters to shy away from too many stupid comments. If you think you may say something stupid, please be cautious, because I may just delete it. My role as a moderator is basically to periodically engage in some ‘natural selection’ and apply some pressure. This is not something that is up for debate.

There is no schedule for the podcasts, but another will be dropping within the next few hours, and more stuff is going to be recorded tomorrow, and I just recorded something today on foreign policy with Richard Hanania.

Browncast Episode 111: Rob Henderson, from redneck to turtleneck

Razib Khan · July 24, 2020 · 1 comment

I would though appreciate more positive reviews! Alton Brown’s “Browncast” has 30 reviews on Stitcher alone! Help make us the biggest browncast! At least at some point.

In this episode, I talk to Rob Henderson, a Ph.D. student in psychology at Cambridge, a graduate of Yale, and a former member of the United States military. Rob was born to a drug-addicted Korean mother. He does not know who his biological father is, and spent his early years in the working-class town of Red Bluff, bouncing around foster homes before he was finally adopted, albeit into a very unstable family situation.

After a stint in the military, Rob decided to pursue his intellectual interests and received admission into Yale. I got to know Rob first through his op-ed in The New York Times, Why Being a Foster Child Made Me a Conservative. Rob’s current plan is to continue being a writer and return to the United States.

I’m pretty pessimistic on the United States in many ways, but Rob’s life is a testament to what makes this country great, even today.

What do we call the Ancient Ancestral North Indians?

Razib Khan · July 23, 2020 · 75 comments

Commenters on this weblog have expressed dissatisfaction with the nomenclature of the “eastern Iranian farmers” who were the dominant genetic contributors to the Indus Valley People. The author of The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia agrees that this is a problem.

To review: the dominant ancestry component, called Iranian-related or eastern Iranian farmer, has two components. About 5-10% is related to “West Siberian Hunter-Gatherers”, who mostly descend from “Ancient North Eurasian” Paleo-Siberian groups (this group contributed ancestry to eastern European hunter-gatherers and Native Americans). The remainder of the ancestry is related to farming populations that are termed “Iranian” from samples in the Zagros in the early Holocene. But the genetics indicates that the separation of the Indian ancestry component dates to before farming, probably between 10-15,000 years ago. Without ancient DNA that is older, we can’t be sure of its geographic range, but it is reasonable to infer that this was an eastern expansion of hunter-gatherers out of the Zagros (seeing as how the WSHG ancestry is not found in the west, and the broader Iranian farmer clade seems to form a clade with Anatolian farmers and Levantine farmers).

But obviously the use of the term “Iranian” confuses with the nation-state of Iran. This has come up when I use terms like “Iranian-speaking people,” and people get confused because they don’t assume that I’m talking about people who live in Russia (Ossetes), or ancient people who flourished in Xinjiang and Ukraine.

Historically modern Iran was called “Persia”, and Iran was actually more of an archaic civilizational term. But in the 20th-century the Pahlavi’s resurrected this ancient term for the nation-state, so here we are.

The question this: what is a better term for the “Iranian-related farmers”? I have often used the awkward “NW South Asia”, since it seems plausible this group was present in modern-day Pakistan by the early Holocene, and probably earlier. Thoughts?

I’m basically asking for terms and why you think those terms are good. I may adopt a term in the comments for usage on my blogs.

Note: We can’t call them “Ancient Ancestral North Indians” (AANI) since the ANI turn out to be a compound of Indus Periphery and Steppe.

The Brahui, total genetic replacement?

Razib Khan · July 23, 2020 · 59 comments

An Ethnolinguistic and Genetic Perspective on the Origins of the Dravidian-Speaking Brahui in Pakistan:

In this report we reexamine the genetic origins of the Brahuis, and compare them with diverse populations from India, including several Dravidian-speaking groups, and present a genetic perspective on ethnolinguistic groups in present-day Pakistan. Given the high affinity of Brahui to the other Indo-European Pakistani populations and the absence of population admixture with any of the examined Indian Dravidian groups, we conclude that Brahui are an example of cultural (linguistic) retention following a major population replacement.

It was clear 10 years ago when I looked at the HGDP Brahui that they are no different from the HGDP Baloch. This is important because there is as a hypothesis that these Dravidian speakers are migrants from peninsular India. If so, there is no genetic evidence. Admixture must have resulted in total homogenization with the Baloch. This is frankly not plausible for a South Asian group, which tends toward structure.

The second option is that the Brahui Dravidian language is indigenous to the region, and the genetic similar to the Baloch is due to the latter’s reciprocal admixture with the Brahui

The myth of Brahmin supremacy!

Razib Khan · July 21, 2020 · 63 comments

It seems in this globalized world many intellectual movements deploy the same abstractions. For example, the terms “Brahmin privilege” and “Brahmin supremacy” are clearly constructed as perfect analogs to “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” Brahmins cannot have their own independent history, but operationalize a general model of power relations predicated on the white-black dynamic in the United States that developed in the 19th-century (nevermind that Brahmins were in existence long before this).

This piece, Anti-Blackness Goes Back To Ancient Times, has this passage which I know to be promoting ideas which are false:

Other scholars, such as Harvard’s Suraj Yengde, whose research focuses on the solidarity between Dalits and blacks, say that it wasn’t just outsiders — India gave birth to the original color-based social class system that dates back to the ancient Rig Veda texts, to around 1200 B.C. “The Varna system literally means ‘color’ system, so it’s not surprising that Indians in America have maintained these racist dogmas,” he said. Dalits and the black American experience have strong ties because they are the most disenfranchised people in their communities. “This whole situation is having a global ripple effect. I don’t know if it will bring about much change, but people are definitely talking about it.”

Yengde adds that the caste system and skin color are very much linked. “Oftentimes, we’ll see Brahmins push ideas of colorism, racism, casteism on British and Muslim invaders,” he said. That’s why Yengde doesn’t see the inherent bias of some South Asians going away anytime soon.

Within the piece itself, the author notes that there are early Hadith that express racism against dark-skinned people, presumed to be descended from African slaves. Racial attitudes were an issue in the early Islamic period, with a Turkic scholar making the case for the value of his own people, and Arab commentaries on Indians refers somewhat negatively upon their “black” complexion. This persists down to the period of Turkic rule when prestigious “white” Muslims (often born in Central Asia) were distinguished from local “black” Muslims (often descended from converts). Modern colloquial color categories in the Gangetic plain date to this period.

As far as the British, their ideas of race, color, and caste, were shaped by the Atlantic trade and slavery, as well as contacts with Native Americans, long before the rise of the Raj. There was a history of the British Empire long before intense engagement with Indian Brahmins.

I do knot know Yengde’s work, but he seems of a type of modern scholar, taking a meta-narrative, and fitting all of history into that meta-narrative, no matter how absurd. Ultimately this is not a scholarship, but a form of polemic and propaganda.

I stand against this. I will always will.

Addendum: I should note, though there are poor Brahmins, all across India Brahmins tend to be placed nearer the top of the social scale. In a literal sense “Brahmin privilege” is real. But this phenomenon should be explored in the context of Indian history, not a meta-narrative derived from the American context.