Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

the meantime our hypothesis, if it is any good, will help
us to further conquest: that is all that really matters”
(Hocart 1970a:26-27).
To sum up, I will make a comment on the structure and
the narrative in this work and relate it to the above
discussion of structural comparison and interpretative
practice. In Jack Goody’s foreword to Fredrik Barth’s
Cosmologies in the making, he writes, “the basic
procedures of such analysis involve first making a series
of functional or logical models which can be interwoven,
then, second, constructing a single model which can
generate the different forms” (Goody 1993:vii-viii). I
have tried to follow this research strategy throughout the
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work. The constructions of the first degree, the
worldviews as presented by the informants, are
thoroughly presented and described. “Data” (Latin:
“given”) means what is given in an empirical sense and
this is the basis for constructions of the second degree.
In each chapter I have aimed to develop a particular
model, and in the forthcoming conclusion I have tried to
synthesise all these models into what might be called a
construction of third degree. Whether or not these
constructions of second and “third” degrees hold true is
possible to evaluate based on the empirical presentations
or the constructions of the first degree, or by a
counterdemonstration based on other empirical studies in
the same villages or regions.