The Toda People of South India: Between Tradition and Modernity

This book (a reissue with the title slightly changed of the 1998 volume) comprises essays written by Anthony Walker on the Toda people of South India and published over the period 1985 to1993. The first essay "Toda Society: Between Tradition and Modernity", provides the backdrop to all that is to follow. The second, "A Thousand Out of Eight Hundred Million: Who Cares?" explains why the Toda, one of India’s smallest communities, are among its best known in the ethnographic record. The next two essays deal with aspects of Toda ethnography, but presented in radically different ways. Chapter 3 is a polemical paper attacking some and supporting other modern secondary analyses of the Toda kinship and marriage systems. Chapter 4 is a straightforward account in popular style off a well-known Toda ritual: a man gives a symbolic bow and arrow to a pregnant woman in token of his acceptance of the paternity of his unborn child. Chapter 5 takes up the subject of the earliest Christian missio