Today:
Welcome to this week's instalment of /r/AskHistorians' Day of Reflection. Nobody can read everything that appears here each day, so in this thread we invite you to share anything you'd like to highlight from the last week - an interesting discussion, an informative answer, an insightful question that was overlooked, or anything else.
I enjoyed this week:
/u/Qweniden in When did humans start drinking things that weren't water?
/u/restricteddata in How did the Soviet Union manage to acquire atomic bomb technology?
(some of them dangerously close to April 1st...)
I wanted to highlight the question about the historical origins of the Indian (South Asian) "caste" system.. This question didn't have any really novel answers, but led to a fairly interesting discussion the ongoing influence of Edward Said's Orientalism on both scholarly and popular conceptions of South Asian social history. One of my personal insights from this discussion was the realization of the degree to which I have personally internalized Western "Orientalist" tropes about the region to the point where I don't even think to critically examine my assumptions. /u/VSindhicate really took me to task for this -- I guess it boils down to the fact that I identify too much with the desires and motives of the imperial agents more than those of the "subalterns".
In that same thread, I also want to highlight the conversation between /u/Periadoc and /u/rmcampbell about the way in which jati does and does not correlate with ancestry. The most interesting to me is that while there has clearly been a great deal of changes in the relative economic and social status and different jati, there is also a fair amount of evidence that many jati have had high levels of endogamy, with relatively few individuals (fewer than 1 in 60) marrying outside of their "caste" in each generation, even as the social and economic role/status of each "caste" changed over time.