Suchergebnisse

Kinship and History in South Asia presents four papers given at a small conference of kinship studies scholars, "Kinship and History in South Asia," at the University of Toronto in 1973. They draw upon one another and show several common concerns, particularly the theoretical importance of Dravidian systems. Yey they remain specialist studies, each within its own raison d'être. Brendra E. F. Beck contributes a study of the "kinship nucleus" in Tamil folklore, Levi-Straussian both in its treatment of kinship and of mythology. George L. Hart's study of woman and the sacred in the ancient Tamil literature of the Sangam attempts to elucidate this literature in its own terms, and also to relate it to Beck's "kinship nucleus." Thomas R. Trautmann presents a critical examination of the evidence for cross-cousin marriage in early North India, attempting to determine historical fact from literary materials. Narendra K. Wagle offers a survey of the kinship categories to be found in the Pali Jatakas.

Contents -- List of illustrations -- Sources and credits -- Preface -- Prologue -- 1. The retreat and persistance of elephants -- Elephants and Indian Kingship -- 2. War elephants -- 3. Structures of use: caturanga, vahana, vyuha -- 4. Elephant knowledge -- The spread of the war elephant -- 5. North India, South India, Sri Lanka -- 6. The Near East, North Africa, Europe -- 7. Southeast Asia -- After the war elephant -- 8. Drawing the balance, looking ahead -- Bibliography -- Index.

Because of their enormous size, elephants have been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In the early civilisations - Egypt, Assyria and Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilisation, China - kings have used elephants in royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, and the conspicuous consumption of ivory - all of them tending toward the elephant's extinction. But the kings of India, as Thomas Trautmann writes in this book, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war.

Projects -- Indian intellectuals -- Language in South India -- Objects of study

Kinship and its inventors -- Scale of mind, scale of history -- A lawyer among the Iroquois -- Philology in its relations to ethnology -- Generalizing Iroquois -- Nature and art -- Conjectural history -- Kinship's other inventors -- Of time and ethnology -- Contributions to knowledge -- Appendix 1. The revolution in ethnological time -- Appendix 2. India and the study of kinship terminologies -- Appendix 3. The whole history of kinship terminologies in three chapters : before Morgan, Morgan, and after Morgan

AbstractMegasthenes was an eyewitness to the reign of Chandragupta Maurya, maker of the first India-wide empire (from ca. 321 BCE). The army with which he made that empire depended largely upon the supply of men, horses, elephants, and oxen, a sector which may be called military livestock. Megasthenes' account of this large sector of government expense and the policies under which it operated gives important testimony about the causes of Chandragupta's success, namely the maintenance of a royal monopoly of horses, elephants, and arms, payment of the soldiers in peacetime and war, the demilitarization of the farmers, and the separation of the soldiers from the land. Over the long run of Indian history, from the Mauryan Empire to the present, the environmental roots of the political order lay in the complementary distribution of horse and elephant country, to the dry west and humid east of a line running down the middle of the Subcontinent; that is, respectively, the valleys of the Indus and the Ganga. The dominating power of India has always had its capital in elephant country, the valley of the Ganga, in cities from Pataliputra (Patna) to Kanauj to Delhi, in a position from which to control the eastward flow of horses and the westward flow of elephants to other states.

It was the unanimous opinion of the early Orientalists of British India that India had no history, at least in the sense of historical writings. Like every consensus, it contained many variations of detail, as we shall see, but as the view of experts it was widely influential for a long time. For example, R. C. Majumdar gave a thoughtful version of this view at the beginning of the multivolumeHistory and Culture of the Indian People(Majumdar 1951) by Indian scholars, published shortly after independence. But the consensus was eroded by the rise of what we may call the "colonial knowledge" paradigm, which asserted a close connection between European rule and European knowledge of India. It tended to discredit the old consensus and to lighten the specific gravity of Orientalist knowledge, simplifying it as an object of historical explanation. This development has cleared an opening, in recent decades, for a rush of new studies tending to create an opposing consensus, that Indiadidhave history of a kind, it being the task of scholars to explicate what kind, exactly, that was (for example, Pathak 1966; Warder 1972; Thapar 1992; Wagoner 1993; Ali, ed. 1999; Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 2001; Guha 2004; Mantena 2007). This in itself has been very much to the good, by reopening questions that had been closed by the old consensus. The old consensus itself, by contrast, was dismissed without much examination, and was attributed to colonial interest, cultural misunderstanding, or insufficient grasp of Indian languages and literatures. The old consensus now is seen as a simple ideological projection, easily explained and dismissed, with little complexity or interest for historical investigation. But this simplifying action of the prevailing paradigm renders invisible some of the very real effects of the old consensus, effects whose explanation can be very valuable to us. In order to gain the benefit it holds we have to take it seriously, trying both to explain it historically and to decide whether or in what way it is true.

Having brought my editorship to an end just before the CSSH fiftieth birthday—having, you might say, just stepped out of the maelstrom—it might be worthwhile to seize the occasion to analyze, in tranquility, what at the time was just too intense, too difficult but also too deeply satisfying an experience to put into words. Without a doubt, being editor of CSSH was the most gratifying job I ever had, but why? How to bottle the maelstrom?

CULTURE POWER Being in the habit of taking the temperature of anthropology from time to time (Sherry B. Ortner, "Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties," CSSH 1984: 174–90; "Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal," 1995: 173–93; Webb Keane, "Self-Interpretation, Agency and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy," 2003: 222–48), we take a keen interest in the health of the culture concept. News of its demise may be exaggerated, judging by the first article, which draws our attention to its worldwide spread and tries to account for it.

POWER FLOWER Imperial science and its collaborations, its landscapes, and its audiences is the theme of many interesting studies of late, including several pieces in this journal, such as Robert Shanafelt, "How Charles Darwin Got Emotional Expression out of South Africa (and the People who Helped Him)" (2003: 783–814), and Saul Dubow, "Earth History, Natural History, and Prehistory at the Cape, 1860–1875" (2004: 107–33). The first essay examines the practice and narrativizing of flower-collecting under imperial conditions.