See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/267211565

Constructing 'the Great Tradition:' The Comparative Civilizations Project at

Chicago in the context of South Asian Studies

Conference Paper · October 2014

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.1194.2406

CITATIONS READS

0 1,549

1 author:

Kathleen D. Morrison
University of Pennsylvania
107 PUBLICATIONS 2,050 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Kathleen D. Morrison on 22 October 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Constructing ‘the Great Tradition:’ The Comparative Civilizations Project at Chicago in
the context of South Asian Studies

Kathleen D. Morrison
1126 E. 59th St.
University of Chicago

DRAFT: spoken presentation with incomplete citations. Numbers in brackets are placement of
slides. Circulation for comments; if you wish to cite this, please let me know.
morrison@uchicago.edu

paper presented at the conference, “Appraisal of Robert Redfield’s “Great and Little
Traditions” Framework for Theorizing Long-Term Historical Processes in the Pre-Modern
Levant,” Center for Advanced Study, Oslo, Norway, October 6-8, 2014. (The subtitle of the talk
was changed from the original abstract).

***

[1] We’ve come here to discuss Robert Redfield’s ‘great’ and ‘little’ tradition framework
and its value for discussing record of the premodern Levant. I was invited, I suspect, because I
am on the faculty of the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago, where Redfield
did his work and where, as I’ll discuss, he and his colleagues had a significant impact on the
undergraduate curriculum we still teach. There is a story here – one ably told by historian John
Boyer, dean of Chicago’s undergraduate College – that, as he puts it, “ leads from teaching, to
research, and back to teaching again” (10) So, if I reminisce about my College courses, this is
actually on point, believe it or not, with the theme of the conference. [2]

Today I’ll talk a little about the ‘comparative civilizations’ project of Redfield and his
colleague Milton Singer, moving toward consideration of the notion of tradition itself, how
traditions are built, contested, and deployed. Besides having taught for nearly 20 years at the
University of Chicago,I also work on the archaeology and anthropology of India, the place where
the ‘great’ and ‘little’ tradition framework was perhaps most famously deployed. [3] My title
refers to Milton Singer’s book, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, published in 1972.
Obviously here there is a great interest here in ‘modernity’ as such, and its supposed contrast
with ‘tradition,’ a concern very much in circulation at the time. This interest can be seen also in
the work of Chicago political scientists Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph in various articles later
collated into their book The Modernity of Tradition, published in1967. In the larger ferment over
postwar “modernization theory” it would be easy to forget the specifically anthropological and, I
must say, the specifically ‘Chicago’ history of the notion of the ‘great’ and ‘little’ tradition, so I
will focus on this today, in order to first contextualize and then, I hope, move beyond this simple
binary.

[4] Although I will necessarily run through some history of anthropology in this talk and
although I frame the talk in terms of both the conceptualization and the residue of the

1
“comparative civilizations” project in the Chicago curriculum, I want to use these discussions to
consider the notion of ‘tradition’ itself, especially from a longer-term, archaeological and
historical perspective. This long-term view, which includes the testimony of those often mute or
muted in the documentary record, highlights the differential power people have had of making
their views, their stories, and their practices ‘great.’ So, we can ask, whose great tradition? And
when? Traditions are both contested and historical. It’s important, then, not to accept great/little
framework in its more essentialist form, but to keep in mind that traditions is constructed and
contested, traditions are works in progress, sides of the story, arguments about the world.

I won’t be able to say much about South Asian history here, except to note that what has
been seen by some, Redfield and Singer included, as the “great” tradition of South Asia is by no
means universally accepted as such. To put it mildly, this disagreement has never been
politically neutral. Indeed, the contemporary electoral politics of India are impossible to
understand without reference to ongoing attempts to define the great tradition of India in
precisely the way Redfield and Singer did, that is, in terms of a specific imagination of Vedic,
caste-based Hinduism. The dominance of this view, promoted in large part by Brahmins and
other high castes whose position in the hierarchy is predictably lofty, [5] has historically been
linked to the control of specific kinds of technologies such as schooling, language, and a whole
range of material and ritual practices that were (and still are) available only to a minority. The
learning of Sanskrit, of the Vedas, even literacy itself, were once tightly controlled and, as many
scholars have noted, the writing of Indian history, even the colonial and postcolonial histories
written by westerners, has often reflected the efforts of a restricted section of Indian society to
define their own situation as normative and unmarked and those of others – [6] tribal peoples,
Dalits, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians – as ‘variants.” There is thus both a history and a
politics to defining anything as tradition.

What has rather ungracefully been termed “othering,” is one outcome of the struggle to
define tradition. What is, finally, taken as the basic, normative, or unmarked category of person
is, as feminist scholars will remind us, a power-laden choice. If medical research often takes the
male body as the basic human form, and female biology as a variant, then this has implications
for the types of therapies and drugs developed. If the advocates of ‘Hindutva’ (tr ‘hinduness’),
the ideology of India’s Hindu right, are able successfully define (their form of) Hinduism as more
‘ancient’ and/or more ‘indigenous’ than other religions, this has implications for education,
public perceptions, and ultimately, people’s lives.

‘Great’ traditions, then, are those of the powerful; history, it is said, is written by the
victors. But the work of tradition-building is never done, and it is this ongoing and vital part of a
past which will never stay quiet which is to me so interesting.

[7] In this talk, I use both disciplinary and personal history (my own location as an
‘anthropological archaeologist’ of ‘complex societies’ in South Asia, as the Director of the South
Asia Language and Area Center, and as instructor in both South Asian Civilization and in the
Colonizations course sequence, are derive directly from this history) to consider some ways
tradition is made and remade– or, as some have put it, invented and reinvented. In my very short

2
list of historic examples, I’ll point to several major struggles between different modalities of
tradition-making in South Asia, an historical perspective which ends up, I argue, eroding the
Redfieldian binary1; I think this is a task Pamela Gwynne Price will take up after me, if I
understand her abstract rightly, so hopefully my deficiencies will be made up by her later.

Some Background: Americanist Anthropology and Archaeology

[8] Forgive me if this is all well-known to this audience, but I wanted to talk a bit about
the historical background of the Redfield program and to do this I start with the peculiar
construction of American anthropology. As you probably know, anthropology in the US grew up
in the late 19th and early 20th c. around the study of Native Americans, with a strong sense of
urgency on the part of the discipline that their object of study was disappearing, and consequently
that the language, culture, biology, and history of native peoples needed to be documented as
quickly as possible. This is why I, an archaeologist, am trained entirely within the field of
anthropology and why we still have [8A] the so-called 4 fields of anthropology (list). The initial
regional focus on North America is now, of course, long gone, but the 4 field ideal – what
Bernard Cohen called “the sacred bundle” of the discipline – still exists, at to some extent.

Although I’m not able to say much about the role of archaeology in all this, I’d like to
make the point today that the crisis that helped crystalize the Redfield/Singer program was not
one also faced by archaeology, in spite of the fact that some archaeologists were located within
anthropology departments. As archaeologists, we often think that theory from other fields is
necessarily better than the homemade variety, but in this case –the shift from small-scale,
synchronic community studies to the ‘historic turn’ in anthropology and the social sciences –
archaeologists were already ahead of the game. And if archaeologists are to take up the “great”
and “little” traditions framework – though this would not necessarily be my choice – we should
do so with caution. As historical scholars, we should already be suspicious of ethnography’s
tendency to telescope long, dynamic histories into frozen moments of ‘tradition.’ As students of
the material record, littered with remains of both the literate and illiterate, the powerful and the
poor, we should already be aware of this framework’s tendency to take the authorization of the
‘great’ tradition for granted, leaving aside rival claimants.

[9] Another player in this peculiar history is actually an institution, the University of
Chicago. The UofC as we call it, can be a cradle-to-grave affair, as it was for Redfield, who
studied at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, the College, the graduate division of the
Social Sciences, and who spent his entire professional career there. It was at Chicago that
Redfield found a group of students and colleagues to work out his ideas in diverse ethnographic
field settings; where he found a father-in-law and fellow faculty member, Robert E. Park,
founder of the ‘Chicago school’ of urban sociology to nudge him toward the world of cities; and

1
As an aside, we can discuss the extent to which Redfield thought these were ideal types, or points on a
continuum – such the well-known folk/urban continuum (discussed by Horace Miner in his 1952 article). It may,
however, be less important what Redfield thought he was saying than how people have used his ideas.

3
where he found a colleague, Milton Singer, who took Redfield’s program to both the field in
India and the classroom in Chicago.

[10] In the early 20th c, Americanist anthropology was strongly Boasian in orientation, all
of the earliest departments having been founded either by Boas himself or by one of his students.
Reacting, or maybe overreacting, to neoevolutionary ideas, the Boasians were known for
synchronic studies of small-scale societies and, increasingly, for notions of cultural integration,
pattern, personality, and other ways of expressing the idea of holistic bounded ‘cultures’ as
objects of analysis. Boas, in particular, was strongly opposed to what he called “conjectural
history,” the hallmark of the evolutionists, not only because it represented armchair speculation
unanchored by fieldwork, but especially because of its claim to create historical sequence
through recourse to general principles of change as, for example, in the supposedly evolutionary
sequences of tools and other objects in museums (Hicks 2013; Stocking).

Following both Boas’ own example and the ideals of immersive ethnographic fieldwork
exemplified by Malinowski, anthropology came to mean careful field study and rich, even
minute, ethnographic detail about single ‘cultures.’ While claims to science were important,
generalization and comparison were muted, making prewar Boasian science very different from
the positivist, physics-envying ideal that prevailed in the 1950s.

Allied to the Boasian tradition but differing in important ways was the work of Alfred
Kroeber, [11] student of Boas and founder of the Berkeley department. Kroeber’s work,
unusually, was both historical and broadly comparative, taking in such diverse topics as ceramic
seriation (at Zuni pueblo), historical trends in skirt lengths, myths of the California Indians, and
the rise and fall of civilizations2.

[12] The marriage between Boasian cultural anthropology and British structural-
functionalism was consummated at the University of Chicago when A.R. Radcliffe-Brown joined
the anthropology faculty in 1931 (to 1937), a partnership which only hardened the anti-historical
and anti-comparative bias of ethnography.

Into this milieu, history intervened – first in the form of war, with American
anthropologists thrust into service to the nation [13] and confronted, many for the first time, with
an imperative to move beyond the small-scale, presumably integrated and self-contained societies
they had been studying. The ensuing crisis of ethnography jolted ethnographers away from, on
the one hand, an exclusive focus on small communities, and on the other, their role as purveyors
of the exotic. This latter task is what another Chicago anthropologist, Michele Rolph-Truillot,
has called filling “the savage slot,” a division of academic labor that left to anthropology what

2
As historian Ranajit Guha put it in his introduction to Bernard Cohen’s magnum opus, An Anthropologist
Among the Historians, the historicist tradition in anthropology represented by Kroeber (and carried forward, he
argues, by Cohn), “...sets itself apart from the tendency to indulge in unverifiable generalizations characteristic of
diffusionism at one extreme and from an excessive commitment, at the other, to ‘a microscopic view dealing only
with short-term change.’”

4
Redfield would come to call the “little traditions” – those outside mainstream, urban, literate, and
especially ‘modern’ society.

If anthropologists had long been focused on the small, the marginal, and the exotic, it’s of
course not the case that cities, markets, written literatures, what came to be called ‘world
religions,’ had been ignored. Sociology, political science, economics and other social science
disciplines were caught up, in the 50s and 60s, in bids to become more scientific, both by
elucidating general social principles and by being more quantitative. If the ‘harder’ social
sciences already covered modern and urban societies, the literature, religion, art, languages,
music, and philosophy of the west and its putative ancestors had long been the domain of the
humanities. We can in some sense think about the postwar crisis of ethnography in terms of
cultural anthropology’s discovery of the humanities, covered with a veneer of scientism.

Within anthropology, no field in the humanities would come to be more important than
history (though the Chicago history department is in the Social Sciences Division, which will
make a difference in this story). How cultural anthropologists came to terms with history and
with change differed, and to simplify a bit we can compare the Redfieldian comparative program
– including the ‘folk-urban continuum’ and related concerns about ‘modernization’ – with what
would come to called the ‘historic turn’ in the social sciences. The former represents, I would
argue, a strategy for maintaining the synchronic focus of ethnography while making a gesture
toward historicity. The latter, which requires a whole new set of methods, comes close to
merging anthropology and history and represents, I would argue, a more viable program for
archaeology.

It’s too easy to use the second world war as marking a definitive break in Americanist
anthropology and to argue that suddenly ethnographers began moving beyond small-scale
societies, because actually the transition was much slower than that. Certainly by now the idea
that anthropology ought to restrict itself to ‘tribal,’ ‘primitive,’ or even ‘peasant’ societies sounds
impossibly quaint and none of the ethnographers in my department study villages or rural life at
all. The postwar crisis in ethnography was, of course, related to a growing realization not only of
the larger engagement of many societies, even small-scale ones, within larger sociopolitical
contexts – the modernization debate – but also to the fact that, in the wake of postwar
decolonization, it was increasingly difficult to ignore change and to insist on closed, integrated
cultures. [13]

[14] As historian Ranajit Guha put it: as a consequence of decolonization, “...the anthropologist
had history thrust upon him, and the object of his study, the spatial other, was thoroughly
penetrated by the temporal other.”

So, we have a new awareness among ethnographers of the importance of history and of
change. This would eventually help destroy the idea of synchronic, self-contained and
functionally integrated cultures entirely, but in what might be seen as an intermediate step, a new
force, ‘modernization,’ emerged on the scene. Modernization was said to erode ‘traditional’
cultures, and, in the process, temporarily save them as anthropological constructs.

5
 But we are getting ahead of ourselves. [15] Redfield, of course, did his fieldwork in
Mexico, and his dissertation study Tepoztlán, a Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life (1930) as
well as Chan Kom: a Maya Village, written with Alfonso Villa (1934) are classic descriptive
ethnographies. By 1941, when he published Folk Culture of Yucatan, his idea of a specific
modality of folk culture – what would become the “little tradition” – was clearly already
established, though of course Redfield can in no way be credited with originality in this (e.g.
Miner 1952:530).

The premise of Folk Culture involved a comparison between a city, a town, a ‘peasant
village’ and a ‘tribal village,’ each representing a point on the hypothetical folk-urban
continuum. As Horace Miner, who was sympathetic to the program, wrote in 1952,
characteristics of the folk society were “derived by discovering the common traits of those
societies which are least like our own,” adding, “The definitive qualities of the urban type are
then left as logically opposite ones to those which characterize the folk.” (1952:530).
Notwithstanding the fact that a city, Merida, was included in the study, the emphasis is decisively
on the smaller-scale locations and the ways their “isolation” and “homogeneity” were modified
by contact with the less isolated and more heterogeneous places. Importantly, this continuum is
also represented as an historical progression, with the tribal village representing the deepest past
and the city its future. As Boas might say, conjectural history again!

[16] In the final chapter of Folk Culture, Redfield concludes, “It would be assumed that,
because the more remote communities have had less contact with the one important center of
influence, what is to found in the more remote communities represents on the whole an earlier
condition of the same general custom or institution than what is to be found in less remote
communities.” (340, emphasis added). This is a classic “space for time” substitution – an
ordering of contemporaneous examples into a putatively historical sequence, a form of ‘history’-
making that takes place in the absence of actual time-ordered evidence (Fabian 1983; Morrison
1995). Redfield goes on to refer to his scheme as “a sort of generalized hypothetical account of
the history of...Yucatecan society taken as a whole. [16b] In a similar way it might be validly
asserted that a comparative description of communities encountered as one goes from Paris
southward through Marseilles, Algiers, the Sahara and then the Sudan would provide the vague
outlines of the culture history of western Europe.” (340)

Johannes Fabian referred to this form of argument, in which contemporary peoples are
cast as ‘ancestors’ as the “denial of coevalness,” and the way that “anthropology makes its
object.” This is one modality of addressing change and history, but not perhaps the one we, as
historical scholars, might wish to follow.

The word ‘premodern’ is in the title of this conference, but of course the specter of
modernity looms over the entire Redfield/Singer project. [17] Redfield’s restudy of Chan Kom,
The Village that Chose Progress (published in 1950), engages explicitly with modernization
theory and in general we can feel a sense of anxiety over how, exactly, anthropology’s object
came to be so fatally compromised. The answer, of course, would lie in a complete rethinking of

6
the anthropological concept of culture and the eventual jettisoning of belief in coherent, bounded,
cultural entities. But the extension of ethnographic interest to larger social formations, to
‘civilizations’ as objects of study did not, at first, lead to a dismantling of the ethnographic
culture concept but rather to an attempt to transform civilizations into mega-cultures; bounded
entities which, while large and complex, divided into “great” and “little” traditions, could be
studied ethnographically and compared to yield general, scientific insights.

This brings us to Redfield and Singer’s ‘comparative civilizations” project which

represented an attempt to come to terms with the world outside Americanist anthropology and in
particular the large-scale, the historical, the comparative, and the civilizational. All this would
have a great influence on the academy, including the development of the so-called “area studies
approach” and for which Chicago faculty found major financial support from the Ford and
Carnegie foundations3. Area studies grew directly out of the war effort and are, though now very
anemically, still supported by the federal government, which links this directly to an imagination
of national security. Indeed, nationalism and constructions of ‘the nation’ are foundational to the
area studies approach (Hancock 1998).

Back to teaching for the moment – the development of area studies in the national and
international arena was linked to changes in curriculum. At Chicago, the program of
‘comparative civilizations’ was developed by Redfield in collaboration with a young philosopher
hired by the undergraduate College to revise the social sciences core curriculum, Milton Singer
(Boyer 13). [18] Singer emphasized both the comparative and self-defining role of the new
course, Social Sciences 2, to be required of all Chicago undergraduates:
the task of examining the possibilities and limitations of studying human nature
and society in a scientific spirit falls largely to Social Sciences 2...it is a field in
which scientific analysis can and does lead to better human understanding of
interpersonal and intergroup relations. . ..Unlike the first course, Social Sciences 2
is concerned not exclusively with the student’s own society and culture but with
societies in general and with widely contrasting types of culture. The student is
thus led to view his own society as but one member of the species “society” and to
look for the common characteristics of all societies. (1950:124)

We still a required social science core curriculum, but this was also the start of a new era
as SS2 laid the groundwork for testing out the Redfield program in the field, work that returned
to the classroom to create a whole new category of undergraduate course, the “civilization
sequence.” [19] Civilization courses are the pedagogical parallels of area studies – building from
a required “Western Civilization” course taught from the 1930s onward, the “non-western civs”

3
The death of area studies has been proclaimed several times, but it still persists – at Chicago we have
centers for the study of South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Note, of course
that western Europe and North America seem not to need special centers; these are the unmarked locations of
knowledge and history and out programs of for the study of France and Britain are differently administered.

7
started in the 50s and are now are offered both on campus and abroad4. I teach in South Asian
Civ regularly, and in a few minutes I’ll mention the difficulties this concept presents in the
classroom – what is South Asian Civilization? Is it really a single thing? Where is there
coherence here? Who defines what “it” is? What’s the history of this idea? What of the British
assertion that India as such did not exist before they arrived to create it? Here, of course, themes
of the ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions come to the fore, representing, I would suggest, a sort of last-
ditch effort to save the idea of coherent civilizational traditions as ramped-up anthropological
cultures. Any slippage in defining these units can, it seems, be attributed to that apparently
external force, ‘modernization,’ and the moment of ‘real’ cultural integration pushed back into an
imagined past.

[20] In 1954, a conference was organized by Redfield and Singer, a Chicago Ph.D. who
had been hired by the College to restructure the social sciences core course (Boyer 13). This
resulted in a book edited by McKim Marriott, Village India: Studies in the Little Community
(1955). Also contributing to the volume was a young Chicago anthropologist, Bernard Cohn.

I’ll use a somewhat overdrawn comparison between Kim and Barney (mcKim Marriott
and Bernard Cohen, both long-time colleagues, Kim still with us, Barney died in 2003) to
illustrate two divergent paths that emerged out of the Redfield/Singer milieu. Kim and his
students continued to emphasize small communities [21] and to view the ‘great’ tradition as
something that was mostly ‘out there’ away from the village but also (to a minor extent) a
composite product of the ‘little’ village traditions. Eventually, the ‘great’ tradition itself became
the primary focus of Kim’s work, not in terms of its content as studied by the humanities –
philosophy, literature, and so on – but instead as a kind of basic mental and psychological
template, a mode of culturally-determined being – seen here in forms of his famous cube’ – that
was essentially ‘Hindu.’ For Kim, the ‘great’ tradition is hard-wired into the body.

[22] By contrast, I’ll use Barney’s work as one example of the ‘historic turn’ in
anthropology, a move that created a very close accommodation with disciplinary history and
which also required interaction with the humanistic study of South Asia. This work was all
about tradition as well, but here tradition is seen as: (1) historical and; (2) an outcome of power,
especially the power-knowledge nexus. Barney’s special interest was in British colonialism and
its historic power to invent tradition in India, a process he documented in a series of articles that
would lay the foundation for some very basic questioning of categories like caste, long thought to
be fundamental to ‘Indian civilization.’ [23]

Ranajit Guha again: “The ‘great civilization’ Cohn had set out to study was..caught up in
the most serious crisis of its career – the crisis of decolonization. [war, famine, partition riots,
refugee exodus] Thus the anthropologist had history thrust upon him, and the object of his study,
the spatial other, was thoroughly penetrated by the temporal other. The strength and distinction of

4
Singer and others advocated the work of ‘comparative civilizations’ as a liberal counterpart against Cold
War isolationism; the knowledge area studies and courses like SS2 were meant to promote was not only about
civilizational ‘others’ but, in the end, mostly about the American self

8
Cohn’s work lie in the fact that unlike some of his professional colleagues he did not pretend that
an interpenetration of this order had not occurred, or that it would go away if only one kept one’s
head buried in a synchronic dune on a microscopic site. On the contrary he confronted the
problem directly as a question of power articulated in the historical relationship of rulers and
ruled.” (xiv).

The new historical anthropology required new forms of fieldwork, as Jean Comaroff put
it, ‘ethnography in the archive,’ and also significant cross-training in history. Let’s go back for a
moment to Milton Singer, the instructor of SS2 and follower of Redfield. Singer actually had
very little background in the study of South Asia [24] before he started the fieldwork that led to
his 1973 book, When a Great Tradition Modernizes. This work is perhaps the classic statement
of the ‘great’ and ‘little’ tradition framework. In it, Singer argues that lives of Brahmin
businessmen in Madras, a large city, were ‘still’ (note the historical presumption here) very much
linked to the ‘great’ traditions of Vedic Hinduism despite also being ‘modern’ and ‘urban.’ This
work was intended, like Redfield’s Folk Culture, to use ethnography to build both science and
history and, like Redfield, history was made not by studying historical texts or artifacts, but by
positing a conjectural sequence of change5.

The fact that Singer’s work in Madras was done by someone with very little background
in Indology and with no language skills makes it perhaps less surprising that the book replicates
the assertions of his Brahmin interlocutors that they were keepers of an ancient ‘great tradition’
that was, furthermore, the ‘great tradition’ of India. This is amazingly parallel to the historical
process of colonial knowledge production in the East India company, when learned pandits,
Brahmins to the man, instructed British officers in Sanskrit language and literature. As
ethnographer Mary Hancock (2010:346), who conducted fieldwork with the same group as
Singer 30 years later, notes, the Smarta Brahmins they both studied served as ‘cultural brokers’
both before and after independence, “frequently in ways meant to serve the ends of official
nationalism.” The concurrence of the nation-defining role of these Brahmins with the nation-
defining task of area studies was no coincidence. On both sides of the globe, boundaries were
being defined by elite scholars and educators, professors, administrators working, to cite
Hancock again, to “fix the boundaries between authenticity and artifice, inside and outside,
center, and margin.” (372)

Whose great tradition? In 18th century Bengal and 20th century Madras, the claims of a
small but powerful group claiming to be keepers of a single great tradition were taken at face
value as evidence of the ancient, authorized, valid tradition of South Asia. But this has never
been unchallenged.

[25] As Robert Miller put it (1966:27) in his work on Mahar traditon – Mahars are an
outcaste or untouchable group in western India –

5
Redfield and Singer’s joint article, “The Cultural Role of Cities” (1954) was an attempt, as Singer writes
(1972:8) to add “the dimension of archaeology and history... and interpose[s] a ‘primary civilization’ between the
folk society and the culture.” Neither archaeology nor history were, however, ever really part of the program.

9
 To expect to find a Great Tradition in a civilization is to transfer one
anthropological model, that of the relatively homogeneous, fully integrated,
'organismic' tribal culture, to the 'mechanical' world of multiple ethnic groups,
regions, histories, articulated politically and literarily by those dominant in the
culture. We have been, in truth, seeking not one Great Tradition, but many, all of
which have been articulated by a dominant segment of the society to form a
cultural system operative within India through millenia.

From the Mahar point of view, however, the Brahminical tradition has no validity (Miller
1966:27):
Trapped within a system they had no part in shaping, the Mahar saw dimly what
we too find difficult to perceive, i.e., that the Brahman was engaged in a gigantic
'cut and paste' job, attempting to continually revise and propagate an orthodox
version of the Great Tradition.

Tradition is an argument, always historical, always contested. As I would be happy to talk

about and as the next paper will, I think, demonstrate, the so-called “indigenous civilization” of
South Asia (as defined by Marriott, Singer, Redfield, and others) is no less composite, power-
laden, historical, and contested than is the “secondary civilization” of the Yucatan peninsula,
with its difficult-to-ignore history of European colonial domination. What historical
anthropology gave us, and what archaeologists had already been able to do, was to see beyond
the stories of a singular premodern past told to the unwitting ethnographer. Tradition is
historically-specific, a product of the present as much as the past, and an object of struggle.

This is where I wanted to put the real heart of my talk – my own archaeological work on
the construction and contestation of tradition in southern India. But it took me too long to lay the
background, so I can only list [26] a few of the historic tensions in the making of South Asia:
(1) the suppression of earlier megalithic traditions of south India by emergent forms of
Buddhism and early Hinduism;

(2) the suppression of Buddhism by Œaivite and Vaisnavite sects of Hinduism;

(3) the co-optation of local goddesses into orthodox Hindu pantheons that followed
military conquests;

(4) the evidence of hero stones from the Nilgiri mountains that show alternative
ideologies of female heroism;

(5) the ways in which Islamicate cultural traditions of the Medieval Deccan, including
forms of courtly culture shared by Muslim and Hindu elites, were erased by
historiographic traditions intent on creating a singular “Hindu” identity;

(6) the forcible inclusion of Dalits – untouchables, called “Harijans”or children of god by
Gandhi, into the Hindu fold; and not least

10
 (7) the ways in which the present-day Hindu right has used force to impose their vision of
the ‘great tradition’ – that very same one identified by Marriott, Singer, and others – for
the Indian nation.

If there was an end of innocence in anthropology, it came about in part because of the
‘historic turn’ and the work of people like Barney Cohn and his students. At the heart of the
disciplinary soul-searching of the 1980s was new consideration of anthropology’s role in
European colonial domination. Not only had the brute fact of colonialism long been minimized
or entirely ignored in ethnographic accounts – but even worse, anthropology itself came to be
seen as a “colonial form of knowledge.” (Cover of Cohen 1996).

[27] A short postscript about archaeology. The postwar crisis in ethnography was never
felt in archaeology, at least not among those working on what we now called complex societies.
In the institutional context of Chicago, the study of what was then called ‘man’s rise to
civilization’ was the purview of the Oriental Institute, whose teaching faculty sit in the graduate
Division of the Humanities. The notion of the passing of the torch of civilization from the
ancient Near East to the Classical Mediterranean world, and from there to the west was of course
part of the vision of a western “great tradition,” a ‘civilization’ whose content was taught to
Chicago students for 50 years before they were finally able to substitute a parallel course on some
other, non-western ‘great tradition’ to fulfill their requirement (Boyer, pers. comm.). [This image
is of the door to the OI museum; note the bison on the right...etc (Larsen 2000)]

[28] When I teach South Asian Civ I always start with the idea of civilization itself,
grappling with this and with what it is that constitutes the “unity in diversity” claimed by the
Indian nation-state. What I find most compelling is not religion, language, way of life, literature,
or any such ‘civilizational’ features which are incredibly diverse. Instead, the thing which most
pulls “South Asian civ” together pedagogically are its shared historic experiences of tradition-
making, contestation, and re-making. It is not a ‘great’ or even many ‘little’ traditions that make
South Asian civilization somewhat coherent as a concept, it’s the shared experience of tradition
as process, a process that has always been messy and contested. What Miller called the “cutting
and paste job” behind the great tradition is ongoing.

We still require a civilization course [29] and I still teach South Asian Civ every so often;
the cracks in the concept have led, interestingly, to a whole new suite of ‘Civ’ sequences that
burst open the old area studies envelopes, including a new gender-oriented sequence and one I
teach in called ‘colonizations.’ Colonizations is a course sequence dominated by historians,
archaeologists, and anthropologists and is itself a very real outcome of the ‘historic turn’ in the
social sciences. I return finally, to the words I started with, from John Boyer’s history of the
(19xx:10) Redfield/Singer program at Chicago:
The story that I am about to tell affords an instructive example of a teaching and
research project, born in the general context of a College course, traveling through
an extremely ambitious program of faculty research funded by a major foundation,
and ending up back in other and newer College courses. So, my story leads from
teaching, to research, and back to teaching again..

11
 And so does mine.

12

View publication stats