COLLECTIVE REACTION

Economists have generally emphasized the positive role communities play.¹¹ But the fact that norms can be self-enforcing does not necessarily make them good. The discipline they impose could be directed toward some reactionary, violent, or destructive cause.

Suppose no one actually gives a damn about caste, but anyone who crosses caste lines in sex or marriage is charged with miscegenation and treated like an outcast, meaning nobody will marry into their family and no one will befriend or associate with them. And finally suppose that anyone who defies this norm and marries an outcast also becomes an outcast. Then as long as people are sufficiently forward-looking, and that they do want to get married, this will be enough to stop everyone from breaking the rule, however arbitrary everyone feels it is. Of course, this could shift if enough people start defying the norm. But there is no guarantee it will ever happen.

This is very much the story at the heart of Samskara, a wonderful 1970 Indian film directed by Pattabhi Rama Reddy, in which a Brahmin (and hence a member of the so-called highest caste) becomes “polluted” by sleeping with a low-caste prostitute. When he suddenly dies, no other Brahmin is willing to cremate him for fear of being polluted by contact with him. His body is left to rot in public.The norm becomes a perversion of the community’s rules precisely because the community is stuck in enforcing its own standards.