The work of Louis Dumont, who died in 1998, on India and modern
individualism represented certain theoretical advances on the earlier
structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. One such advance is Dumont's idea
of hierarchical opposition, which he proposed as a truer representation
of indigenous ideologies than Lévi-Strauss's binary opposition. In this
book the author argues that, although structuralism is often thought to
have gone out of fashion, Dumont's greater concern with praxis and
agency makes his own version of structuralism more contemporary. The
work of his followers and fellow travelers, as well as his own,
indicates that hierarchical opposition is capable of taking
structuralism in new and more realistic directions, reminding us that it
has never been the preserve of Lévi-Strauss alone.