Suchergebnisse

"This gripping account of university life puts a candid, personal perspective on clashes and crises around the true cost and value of higher education, the governance of public universities, free speech and academic freedom debates, the politicization of the college campus, and the future of the humanities and liberal arts"--

Introduction : passage to India -- Annals of the archive : ethnographic notes on the sources of history -- Autobiography of an archive -- Preface to the second edition of the Hollow crown -- Castes of mind -- Ritual and resistance : subversion as a social fact -- The policing of tradition : colonialism and anthropology in southern India -- Imperial sovereignty -- Bringing the company back in : the scandal of early global capitalism -- The idea of empire -- In near ruins -- G.S. Ghurye and the politics of sociological knowledge -- South Asian studies : futures past -- Franz Boas and the American university : a personal account -- Scholars and spies : worldly knowledge and the predicament of the university -- The opening of the American mind

When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by

Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, it has been virtually impossible to study the colonial world without explicit or implicit reference to Edward Said's charge that the sources, basic categories, and assumptions of anthropologists, historians of the colonial world, and area studies experts (among others) have been shaped by colonial rule. This article charts Said's influence on anthropology, tracing both anthropology's engagement with colonialism and the frequently ambivalent (and sometimes defensive) responses within the field to Said's critique. The article also considers the larger terrain of Said's engagement with the field, from his concern about its ""literary"" turn of the 1980s to his call for U.S. anthropology explicitly to confront the imperial conditions not only of its epistemological inheritance but also of its present position. Though Said's direct writings on the discipline have been limited, the article concludes that anthropology has not only learned a great deal from Said's critique, but has become one of the most important sites for the productive elaboration and exploration of his ideas.

Le 19 septembre 1990, un étudiant de New Delhi s'arrose de kérosène et s'immole par le feu. Selon certaines versions, Rajeev Goswami n'avait à l'origine d'autre intention que de parodier les immolations traditionnelles et comptait sur quelques amis pour étouffer immédiatement le feu naissant, sitôt l'événement fixé sur les pellicules. But de l'opération : s'assurer de clichés spectaculaires et d'une couverture de presse maximale pour braquer 1" attention des médias sur une vague de manifestations qui va croissant depuis six semaines. Elles s'opposent à une décision gouvernementale que Ion accuse de bloquer l'accès des postes honorables aux jeunes générations issues des plus hautes castes.

In the last few years, modern historians of India have pushed the historical frontier of their field backwards in time. Colonialism is no longer considered the great watershed it once was thought to be. Historians who concern themselves with economic processes such as protoindustrialization tend in particular to minimize the impact of the consolidation of colonial rule in the late eighteenth century. Changes viewed as significant by these historians usually begin with the introduction of capitalism and the early encroachment of a world system, both of which predate the full political realization of colonialism. Historians who concern themselves with political changes tend in the other direction, although increasingly they have proposed major continuities between theancien régimeand the early colonial state. Historians concerned with social change view colonialism as significant but invoke various new forms of dualism to account for the limited effects of colonialism on local social forms. Whatever their differences, all of these historians agree that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are crucial for viewing later changes in economy, polity, and society, and, from their varying theoretical and ideological perspectives, delight in excoriating traditional views of India as static and "traditional" before the arrival of the British.