AUGUST, 1987 MANKIND Vo1.17 N0.2 Hierarchy and Complementarity in Newar Caste, Marriage and Labour Relations MICHAEL ALLEN* Jayawardena, in his unpublished lecture notes on the topic of equality, defended the contentious proposition that inequality is not, as Fallers (1973) and others have argued, an inescapable feature of the human condition. He did so by the simple expedient of pointing to two ethnographic examples, both of them hunter-gatherer societies, which were in his view perva- sively structured in accordance with equali- tarian notions. In this paper I intend to provide additional support for Jayawar- dena’s position by highlighting the importance of complementarity and recip- rocity in a number of key areas in the social life of a community that has been consistently represented in the literature as dominated by hierarchical ideas zyxwv - the caste-structured Newars of Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. zyxwvuts The Newars There are today about a quarter of a million Newars resident in the valley. They are, and have been for at least 1000 years, an essentially urban people, though with an economy in large measure ‘based on intensive rice cultivation. Prior to the Gorkha conquest in 1768, the three neighbouring cities of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhadgaon were the capitals of autono- mous Newar kingdoms. Though little is as yet known concerning the historical development of Newar culture and society, there are good grounds for believing that the earliest immigrants into the valley 1 were predominantly tribal in social structure and shamanistic in religion. The *Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney fertility of the valley and its strategic position for trade between India and Tibet led to the growth of urban centres and substantial political units by at least as early as the first century AD. It also seems likely that Buddhism, which began in the 5th century BC, only some 60 miles south, was well established in the valley by the beginning of the Christian era. But from at least as early as the 3rd century AD, immigrant Hindu dynasties with their attendant Brahman priests and untouchable service castes have encap- sulated the indigenous farmers, traders and artisans in an ever-increasingly complex and hierarchically structured social system. However, the contemporary outcome of this prolonged interaction between predominantly unstratified tribal/ Buddhist indigenous peoples and hierar- chical Hindu immigrants has not been unambiguously in favour of the latter and their values. Though hierarchy is unques- tionably an important feature of Newar social life, in numerous important contexts it’is balanced by an emphasis on comp- lementarity and reciprocity. Furthermore, though the kind of hierarchy that defines relations between the major sub-divisions of Newar society could be described as of the ‘pure’ caste variety, within such sub- divisions hierarchy approximates more closely to that found typically in kin- based societies - that is to say, a form of hierarchy based on notions of relative seniority and age. In support of such a view of Newar society I first examine marriage practices. Following Quigley (1986), I argue that those unions that have been referred to by 92