¹ The essay proceeds through a variety of topics: Introducing the Subject: Amar Singh's Provenance and Career; The Diary as Context and Medium for Self-as- Other Ethnography; Getting Started; Constructing the Other-Some Stories about Culture and Ethnography; ‘Native’ Ethnography; Self-as-Other Ethnography; A Diary as Ethnography; and Selves as Ethnographers.Google Scholar

² Rudolph, Susanne and I have written at greater length about Amar Singh as subject and agent in ‘A Bureaucratic Lineage in Princely India,’ Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XXXTV, no. 3, 03 1975;Google Scholar‘Rajput Adulthood: Reflections on the Amar Singh Diary,’ Daedalus, Spring 1976; ‘Google ScholarAuthority and the Transmission of Values in the Rajput Joint Family,’ in Albin, Mel, ed., New Directions in Psychohistoiy: The Adelphi Papers in Honor of Erik Erikson, Lexington, MA, Lexington Books, D. D. Heath and Co., 1980Google Scholar[these three items were republished in Essays on Rajputana: Reflections on History, Culture and Administration, New Delhi, Concept Publishing Co., 1984];Google Scholar‘Becoming a Diarist: The Making of an Indian Personal Document,’ Indian Social and Economic History Review, June 1988;Google Scholar and ‘Setting the Table: Amar Singh Aboard the SS Mohawk,’ Common Knowledge, Spring 1994, V3 Nl.Google Scholar

³ A marriage had linked leading jagirs [landed estates] of Jodhpur and Jaipur, Pokran and Chomu. When, in 1849, the Pokran spouse—mother of the Thakur of Chomu—died, the Thakur of Pokran was unable to pay the required condolence visit to Chomu. In his place, to represent him, he sent his kinsman and fellow Champawat, the fifty-year-old Thakur of Peelwa, Jivraj Singh.Google Scholar

⁴ Over the next 30 years, until his death in 1880, Ram Singh established a reputation in British and princely India as an outstanding prince, intelligent, learned, skillful, and ‘progressive.’ Ram Singh promoted the arts, education and health, and reformed his state's administration. He built a theater [now a cinema hall] where ‘Parsi’ companies from Bombay performed, an opera hall [now the home of the Rajasthan vidhan sabha state assembly], a hospital, and an art and natural history museum set in a municipal garden, subsequently named for him [the Ram Niwas garden]. Sir Pratap Singh, Amar Singh's mentor and patron at Jodhpur, ‘exiles’ himself to Jaipur in 1873 in part to learn from Ram Singh how to rule a princely state but also to escape hostile bureaucratic and court politics at Jodhpur. Between 1878 and 1922 Sir Pratap served on four occasions as regent of Jodhpur state. Pratap Singh and Narain Singh, Amar Singh's father and head of Ram Singh's household service during Sir P.'s ‘apprenticeship,’ become close friends. Their friendship provides the circumstance for Narain Singh in 1888 to send his ten-year-old eldest son and heir to the Jodhpur court for education and training.Google ScholarFor the progressive quality of Ram Singh's rule, see Roy, Ashim Kumar, History of the Jaipur City, Delhi, Manohar, 1978,Google Scholarand Stern, Robert, The Cat and the Lion: Jaipur State in the British Raj, The Hague, Brill, 1988.Google Scholar

⁵ Singh, Fateh, the youngest of the three, became Thakur of Naila and ‘prime minister’ of Jaipur state [1873–1880], and Shambu Singh, the eldest, became Thakur of Gondher and a minister of various departments of Jaipur state.Google Scholar

⁶ Narain Singh for a time served Maharaja Madho Singh as Nazim [governor] of Jhunjhunu, the unruly northern region of Jaipur state. When Madho Singh lost confidence in him, Narain Singh, with help from the raj's Political Department, found service in Alwar.Google Scholar

⁷ Jai Singh becomes famous—and notorious—as a brilliant ruler who practised and patronized Hindu learning and persecuted Meo Muslims in Alwar. Meo revolts lead to his deposition and exile. For Jai Singh's changing self-image, e.g. from a westernized prince to a Hindu nationalist and ‘Raj Rishi,’ see Mayaram, Shail, ‘The Institution of the Modern State: The Princely States of Alwar and Bharatpur,’ Ch. 2 of Powerful Regimes, Cultural Critiques: The Meos of North India. Mayaram's MS, forthcoming, is based on her 1994 Delhi University Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Ashis Nandy and Veena Das.Google Scholar

⁸ The circumstances that lead Amar Singh into a military career and its early phases—imperial service with the Jodhpur Lancers as part of the allied expeditionary force sent to China in 1900 to deal with the Boxer rebellion and as a cadet in the Imperial Cadet Corps [1901–1905]—are detailed inRudolph, Lloyd I. and Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, eds, Amar Singh's Story: The Diarist as Ethnographer of Princely and British India, forthcoming. A history of the Imperial Cadet Corps can be found in Chapter HI, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Cadet Corps—1900–1914’ of Chandar S. Sundaram's ‘A Grudging Concession.Google ScholarThe Origins of the Indianization of the Indian Army's Officer Corps, 1817–1917,’ Ph.D. dissertation in History, McGill University, 1996.Google Scholar

⁹ Amar Singh sees combat and is mentioned in despatches. For an account of the role of the Indian Army during the early phases of the war, see Mason, Philip, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, its Officers and Men, London, Macmillan/Permac, 1987, Ch. XVII.Google Scholar ‘The First World War,’ 1. ‘France and Flanders’, pp. 412–21. Sent to Basra [in modern Iraq at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers] in 1916, he sees action against Ottoman forces. See Barker, A. J., The Neglected War: Mesopotamia 1914–1918, London, Faber and Faber, 1967.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Dilks, David, Curzon in India, Volume I. Achievement, London, Hart-Davis, 1967–1970, p. 244,Google Scholar Curzon to Dawkins, 24 January 1901. Curzon as Viceroy had launched the Imperial Cadet Corps scheme in 1901 to open military careers to princes and nobles. In 1905, when the first class graduated, Curzon was blocked by opposition in India—inter alia from the Commander—in—Chief, Lord Kitchener—and Britain—inter alia from the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury—from granting King's Commissions to the first batch of graduating cadets. Curzon created a new service, the Indian Land Forces, to accommodate graduating cadets. For an insightful, detailed account of the background and career of the Imperial Cadet Corps in the context of raj-British ideological and bureaucratic politics, see Chandar S. Sundaram, Chapter III, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Cadet Corps 1900–1914’ in ‘A Grudging Concession’. Part IV, ‘A Soldier for the Raj? Amar Singh's Military Career,’ of the The Diary of Amar Singh [forthcoming] contains Amar Singh's diary account of his seven terms [1902–05] at the ICC.

¹¹ First proposed as an act of grace and gratitude in 1915 by Austen Chamberlain, then Secretary of State for India, but strongly opposed in India and Britain, the granting of KCOs to Indians occurred just five days after the ‘historic declaration’ of 20 August 1917 committing Britain to responsible government in India.Google Scholar

¹² For an account, inter alia, of Amar Singh's military career in Jaipur and his relationship with Maharaja Man Singh, see Crewe, Quentin, The Last Maharaja: A Biography of Sawai Man Singh II, Maharaja of Jaipur, London, Michael Joseph, 1985.Google Scholar Crewe made extensive use of Amar Singh's diary in writing Man Singh's biography. Philip Mason's A Matter of Honour, an otherwise masterful study, does not attend to princely state forces or their imperial service units. He argues that ‘the real reason for segregated units [after the 1918 commitment to Indianize the Indian Army's officer corps] was dislike [by British officers] of serving under a "native.” … No one could disguise the fact that most Englishmen believed that hardly any Indians were really good enough to lead Indian troops’ [p. 456]. Farwell's, ByronArmies of the Raj: From the Great Mutiny to Independence: 1858–1947, New York, Norton, 1989,Google Scholar devotes a chapter to ‘Indian Princes and Their Armies’ in which Sir Pratap Singh at Jodhpur is featured. Chandar S. Sundaram's ‘A Grudging Concession’ examines princely state dimensions of India Army Indianization. For further background for Amar Singh's experiences in the Imperial Cadet Corps and the Indian Army, see Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, ‘Setting the Table’; De Witt C. Ellinwood, ‘The Indian Soldier and National Consciousness: 1914–1939,’ Quarterly Review of Historical Studies, Vol. XXVII, no. 1 [1987], pp. 4–24;Google Scholar and Cohen, Stephen P., The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971.Google Scholar

¹³ These themes are more fully developed in Rudloph, Susanne Hoeber and Rudolph, Lloyd I., ‘Becoming a Diarist.’Google Scholar

¹⁴ In recent years there has been a renewal of philosophical and psychological interest in the self concept. I have in mind Ricceur, Paul, Oneself as Another, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1992;Google ScholarTaylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989;Google ScholarLifton, Robert, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in Age of Fragmentation, New York, 1993;Google Scholar and Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, New York, HarperCollins, 1993.Google ScholarMy endeavor is to locate a self concept in Anthropology's preoccupation with the self and other relationship. While related to aspects of Ricceur's, Taylor's, and Lifton's treatments of the self concept, I do not propose in this paper to address directly the hermeneutic, moral, psychological, or historical concerns found in their works. Ricceur frames his study by presenting three ‘philosophical intentions.’ The third bears some relationship to my ‘self-as-other’ story by distinguishing selfhood from sameness through an analysis of ‘the dialectic of self and the other than self [p. 3]. When Taylor speaks of ‘the self [being] partly constituted by its self-interpretations’ fp. 34] he seems close to my account of reflexivity in Amar Singh's self as other ethnography. Similarly, Lifton's account of a ‘protean’ concept of self seems to resemble how Amar Singh responds to his liminal positioning between Rajput princely India and raj British India. None of these accounts of ‘self’ seems willing to accept what might be called an a priori conception of self, i.e. universal, ahistorical, acontextual. I have in mind the a priori sameness found in ‘liberal’ versions that feature a self-interested, instrumental/utilitarian self and in neo-classical economics and rational choice versions that feature a Descartian solipcistic cogito rationalism.Google Scholar

¹⁵ For an internal critique of Malinowski's founding of field work ethnography, see Young's, Michael W. ‘Introduction,’ in Young, Michael W., ed., The Ethnography of Malinowski: The Trobriand Islands 1915–1918, London, Boston, and Henley, Routledge ‘… none of Malinowski's mentors… had managed to fulfill to the letter [the perceived need for] first hand, intensive research…. Until this time [1914], most ethnographic information had been collected by amateurs….Google Scholar It was clear … that academic opinion in Britain at the time was favourably disposed to innovations in ethnographic method, and Malinowski, through his Trobriand fieldwork, amply provided them. It was, in short, a matter of the right man being in the right place at the right time; though such was the man's charismatic influence that he was able to persuade a whole generation of his followers that "social anthropology began in the Trobriand Islands in 1914” [Leach 1957: 124],’p. 7. Malinowski repressed the dilemmas of subjectivity vs objectivity, self vs other. Young speaks of‘… the somewhat incompatible demands between scientific “objectivity” and the personal involvement of the field-worker's “subjectivity.” Despite his incorrigible self-dramatization and his claim that “the facts of anthropology attract me mainly as the best means of knowing myself” [1932a: xxv], Malinowski did not propose any theory which included the observer in its frame of reference. This was at least partly due to his basic orientation: the field of enquiry was wholly external to himself. He [does not mention] … the “personal equation” of the investigator … of events as a corrective measure [ig22: 20–1]. Paradoxically, however, the field diaries which Malinowski himself kept [1967] constitute an entirely different form of document—one which, in laying bare his prejudices, gives the lie to his public image and puts his sincerity severely to the test.’ Young soon quotes the by now notorious remark from Malinowski's posthumously published diaries: “‘As for ethnology: I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog [1967: 167].” ’ For those interested in what Malinowski knew and thought about philosophical issues before he went to the Trobriand Islands, see Thornton, Robert J. and Skalnik, Peter, eds, The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1993. The editors observe that Malinowski's ‘… specific intellectual debts can be traced for the first time to Friedrich Nietzche, Ernst Mach and James George Frazer….’ [p. ix].Google Scholar

¹⁶ See Srinivasan, Amrit, ‘The Subject of Fieldwork: Malinowski and Gandhi,’ Economic and Political Weekly [Bombay], Vol. XXVIII, No. 50 [11 December 1993] for the imperial/colonial setting of British anthropology and its ‘theory’ of the other in a science of man that, according to Srinivasan's reading, served to bolster Britain's ambitions for world hegemony.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The kind of paternalistic, reverse mirror image knowledge that Said, Edward alleged characterized much of Western scholarship about the ‘Orient’—mainly the Middle East but also implicating India and China in his Orientalism, New York, Vintage Books, 1979.Google ScholarHe recaptures the idea in Culture and Imperialism, New York, Alfred Knopf, 1993, when he writes: ‘Conrad seems to be saying [in Nostromo], “We Westerners will decide who is a good native or a bad, because all natives have sufficient existence by virtue of our recognition. We created them, we taught them to speak and think …” ’ [p. xviii]. But Culture and Imperialism is a different book from Orientalism. ‘Yet it was the case nearly everywhere in the non-European world,’ Said says in his 1993 account, ‘that the coming of the white man brought forth some sort of resistance. What I left out of Orientalism was that response to Western dominance which culminated in the great movement of decolonization. Along with armed resistance … there also went considerable efforts in cultural resistance…. [that] in the overwhelming majority of cases … finally won out’ [p. xii]. Amar Singh's self-as-other ethnography is, inter alia, about this resistance.Google Scholar

¹⁸ To say ‘culture in the making as well as in the doing’ opens up a line of inquiry and interpretation that cannot be explored in the space available. To view culture as constituted as well as given suggests that it is wise to avoid dichotomies such as culture vs psychology or structure vs agency as determinants of reality or truth. I am suggesting that all four terms are involved in mutual determining processes and interactions. For a close approximation in the literature of what I have in mind here, see Shweder's, Richard chapter on ‘Cultural Psychology: What Is It?’ in Thinking Through Culture: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1991, where he remarks, inter alia, ‘Psyche refers to the intentional person. Culture refers to the intentional world. Intentional persons and intentional worlds are interdependent things that get dialectically constituted and reconstituted through the intentional activities and practices that are their products, yet make them up …” [p. 101].Google Scholar

¹⁹ I say ‘resemble’ because Amar Singh was not a professionally trained anthropologist. I return to the question of Amar Singh's ethnography from time to time, particularly in the next section.Google Scholar

²⁰ The phrase is from Perrot, Michelle, editor, Goldhammer, Arthur, translator, A History of Private Life, IV, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 497 of Part 4, ‘Backstage,’ by Alain Corbin, section on ‘The Secret of the Individual.’ An account of the rise of the diary in Europe is given at pp. 497–502 and pp. 265–8. ‘The great diarists of the first half of the nineteenth century,’ Corbin tells us, ‘pursued their goal of illumination without the least shadow of literary ambition.’ It was the desire for ‘inner illumination coupled with the obsession with loss [that] gave rise to a practice …” no longer justified, as it had been early in the century by dialogue with the Creator. One of the many factors that contributed to the rise of diaries was, according to Maine de Brian, a way of founding ‘the science of man…. The quest for self was spurred by all the historical factors that deepened the individual's sense of identity.’ The most prominent, according to Corbin, was ‘the insecurity that stemmed from social mobility’ [p. 500]. Diaries are also, according to Anne Martin-Fugier in her section on ‘Bourgeois Rituals,’ reference books, a way of creating a history of the self, a way to record ‘confidential observations’ and the passage of time, in a word to ‘write the history of [one's] life … ‘ [p. 265].Google Scholar

²¹ For an account of this and other reasons for Amar Singh becoming and remaining a diarist, see Rudolph, and Rudolph, , ‘Becoming a Diarist.’Google Scholar

²² See Rudolph, and Rudolph, ‘Setting the Table’ for a micro-analysis of the British empire's hegemonic project in India.Google Scholar

²³ See Young, Michael W.'s ‘Introduction,’ in Young, , ed., The Ethnography of Malinowski, pp. 1–20.Google Scholar

²⁴ For Helmholtz's view, see Weber, Max, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in Gerth, H. and Mills, C. W., eds, From Max Weber, New York, Oxford University Press, 1946, 1972.Google Scholar

²⁵ All references are to ‘Jaipore, Friday, 7th October 1904 [continued on October 9, 12, 14, 16, and 19] NOTES ABOUT MY LAST VISIT TO SATHEEN, V. The Marriage, 26. Impressions and Experiences.’Google Scholar

²⁶ For recent versions of the troubled career of ethnography that I find attractive, see Shweder's, Thinking Through Cultures, particularly ‘Introduction: The Astonishment of Anthropology’ and Chapter 1, ‘Post-Nietzchean Anthropology: The Idea of Multiple Objective Worlds’Google Scholarand Rosaldo, Renato, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston, Beacon Press, 1989, particularly Chapter 1, ‘The Erosion of Classic Norms.’Google Scholar

²⁷ See Torgovnick, Marianna, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Torgovnick argues, cultural self-consciousness in the West has been an evolving consequence of Western thinkers—both literary and social scientific—coming to grips with what they identified and designated as primitive. The ‘fantastical’ views of the primitive have contributed to the effort to find and know ‘us,’ to understand our form of life, to establish a Western civilizational identity. Among those who created mirrors of the primitive which revealed who and what we are were social scientific figures such as Sigmund Freud, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Margaret Mead. It is not, ultimately, the ethnograhic truth about cultures designated primitive that matters for identity but rather that ‘we’ have a concept of the primitive and that it pervades ethnographic discourse about and constructions of the other. Primitivism allows us to ‘project feelings about the present and to draw blueprints of the future’; it is both a convenient and necessary invention.Google Scholar

²⁸ Resaldo, Renato in a section called ‘Cultural Visibility and Invisibility’ in his Culture and Truth, pp. 198–204. The attention to difference in the study of culture, Resaldo argues ‘… results in a peculiar ratio: as the “other” becomes more culturally visible, the “self” becomes correspondingly less so.’ On this reading, subordinate groups have an authentic culture but dominant groups can't discern their own way of life as distinctive and configured. Power associated with class position—or, we might add, colonial dominance—tends to make culture invisible. The result is that ‘the more power one has, the less culture one enjoys, and the more culture one has, the less power one wields’ [p. 202].Google Scholar

²⁹ Young, , Malinowski, p. 11.Google Scholar

³⁰ Characterizing participant observation as a state of being simultaneously engaged and analytic—‘subjective objectivity’—can be found in an early essay by Geertz, Clifford, ‘Thinking as a Moral Act: Dimensions of Anthropological Fieldwork in the New States,’ Antioch Review 28, no. 2 [1968], pp. 139–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ Malinowski, Bronislaw, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, New York, Dutton, 1961, p. 25.Google Scholar

³² See Madan, T. N., ‘On Living Intimately with Strangers,’ in Beteille, Andre and Madan, T. N., Encounter and Experience: Personal Accounts of Field Work, Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1975.Google Scholar

³³ The oft-told story of anthropology's links to colonialism will not be re-told here. Those who have not read Rudyard Kipling's ‘The Head of the District’ or, from a quite different perspective, George Orwell's ‘Shooting an Elephant’ might want to do so. For an account by an ex-colonial master that shows how, like Joel Chandler Harris's character, Br'rer Rabbit, in his Uncle Remus tales, the natives manipulate and sometimes control their colonial masters, see Philip Mason, The Wild Sweet Witch and Call the Next Witness.Google Scholar The story of Anglo-American anthropology's origins and early development as a ‘discipline’ is best told by Stocking, George W. Jr in his Victorian Anthropology, New York, Free Press, 1987,Google Scholarand ‘Ideas and Institutions in American Anthropology: Thoughts Toward a History of the Interwar Years,’ in Stocking, George W. Jr. ed., Selected Papers from the American Anthropologist, 1921–1945, Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association, 1976.Google ScholarFor an account that reads post-Malinowski ethnographic field workers and their ‘science’ as constructions of imperial hegemony and its post-colonial legacy, see Srinivasan, ‘The Subject of Field Work: Malinowski and Gandhi,’ pp. 2745–52.Google Scholar

³⁴ Because I am concerned in this essay wih self-other relationships I focus on Levi-Strauss's orientation to primitive others as in Triste Tropique rather than on the ahistorical universalism of his four volumes [The Raw and the Cooked; From Honey to Ashes; The Origin of Table Manners; The Naked Man] on myths. For an appreciation and critique of his work on myth,see Champagne, Roland A., Claude Levi-Strauss, Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1987. Champagne tells us in his chapter on ‘De-mythologizing’ that ‘The myths collected by Levi-Strauss belong to a sort of collective unconscious, almost Jungian in psychological universality.’ That common bond, ‘that gluey matter, was not easily recognized, even by Levi-Strauss himself. He was accused … of identifying many kinds of logic operating within various groups of myths. At one point, however, he did bring together several observations that approximate the unity in myths: “We know, in fact that myths are transformed … in space. The transformations thus respect a kind of conservation principle of mythical matter … ”’ [pp. 41–42].Google Scholar

³⁵ Didier Eribon challenges Levi-Strauss: ‘According to the critics, the Westerner nonetheless maintains supremacy over the culture he is observing.’ C. L.-S. replies: ‘It's not a question of the supremacy of the observer, but of the supremacy of observation. In order to observe, one must be on the outside…. Knowledge lies on the outside.’ Eribon, Didier, Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 154.Google Scholar

³⁶ Levi-Strauss's reference to the universe seems to have a ‘modern’ provenance. The modern era, whose 300-year career Stephen Toulmin says began in the early seventeenth century and took shape within the assumptions and axioms of Descartes, Newton [via Copernicus and Galileo], and Hobbes, [see his Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York, Free Press, 1990], tended to link ‘the Natural and Social Orders in a single picture’ by looking ‘for models in the physics of their time, seeking a Stable Order of Society behind the flux of historical events, as astronomers had found a Stable Order of Nature behind natural phenomena…. The belief that Society forms a stable, homeostatic system, which was fundamental to eighteenth-century modes of thought and practice, gave the language of Social Order a seemingly ‘scientific’ underpinning…. This physical analogy [to the solar system universe] had deep methodological effects on the social sciences…. Scientific students of society were pure observers, like watchers of stars and planets; their standpoint was as detached from the social facts they reported as the astronomer's was from the planetary facts he recorded…Google ScholarToday, however, such a detached view of objectivity is hardly relevant, even in physics.’ ‘The Twilight of Sovereignty: Subject/ Citizen/Cosmopolitan,’ Graven Images: A Journal of Culture, Law and the Sacred, Volume I, 1994, p. 5.Google Scholar

³⁷ Champagne suggests how Levi-Strauss privileges music and math: ‘The affinity between music and human thinking was an especially obsessive matter for Levi- Strauss…. The mathematical precision of musical notation united with the humanistic pursuit of song and dance to provide a potentially rich discipline from which to learn how to link science and humanism.’ ‘Mathematics gave him the instruments, by means of its formulas, to separate the elements of myth and to reassemble them into a coherent deduction, an approximation of human meaning in an anthropological artifact.’ Levi-Strauss, pp. 69, 95.Google Scholar

³⁸ Levi-Strauss, Claude, Triste Tropique, translated from the French by John and Doreen Weightman, London, Jonathan Cape, 1973, pp. 54–5. Marianna Torgovnick's chapter interpreting Triste Tropique entitled ‘Remembering with Levi-Strauss’ in Gone Primitive finds that ‘Like Freud, Levi-Strauss scripts the primitive in an us/them vocabulary that writes himself into the majority “us” of European culture’ [p. 217]. ‘The anthropologist in the manner of Levi-Strauss,’ Susan Sontag finds, ‘is a new breed altogether…. Essentially he is engaged in saving his own soul, by a curious and ambitious act of intellectual catharsis.’Google Scholar‘The Anthropologist as Hero,’ in Hayes, E. Nelson and Hayes, Tanya, eds, Claude Levi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1970, p. 190.Google Scholar

³⁹ The Scope of Anthropology, London, Jonathan Cape, 1967, pp. 52–3.Google ScholarPubMed

⁴⁰ See, for example, Warner's, Lloyd studies of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in his Yankee city series,Google ScholarRobert, and Lynd, Helen of ‘Middletown’ [Muncie, Indiana],Google Scholar and Wilkinson's, RupertGentlemanly Power, New York, Oxford University Press, 1964, for early studies of downwardly mobile elites in America and Britain. For more on Warner and the Lynds, see footnote 42.Google Scholar

⁴¹ For an account and rebuttal of authenticity's epistemological and ontological claim that only a native can know a native, that it takes a native or African American to know and tell about native or African American, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr, ‘ “Authenticity,” or the Lesson of Little Tree,’ New York Times Book Review, 24 November 1991.Google Scholar An early ironic, perhaps satiric, account of the claim that in order to study a witch you have to be-or become-a witch can be found in Lurie's, Allison novel, Imaginary Friends [New York, Coward-McCann, 1967], an account of two Cornell? sociologists trying to study an up-state New York religious sect whose members believe in the existence and power of extra-terrestrial beings/persons with whom they communicate and whose presence among them they anticipate.Google Scholar

⁴² T. N. Madan, an early reflexive ‘other,’ but not one who made monopoly claims, in an autobiographical account of how he came to study his own community in India, implicitly sees himself as an anomaly when he remarks that ‘social anthropology took a very long time to realize the potential of’ studying one's own society [p. 153]. He cites two of Malinowski's students, Jomo Kenyatta, ‘an African tribal chief,’ and Fei Hsiao-Tung, ‘a Chinese Mandarin,’ whose studies were published in 1938 and 1939, as examples, in Malinowski's words, of anthropologies ‘of one's own people … the most arduous, but also the most valuable achievement of a field worker’ [in his Foreword to Fei's Peasant Life in China, as quoted at page 152 in Madan's ‘On Living Intimately with Strangers’ in Encounter and Experience.Google ScholarRiesman, David, in reference to Helen Merrill Lynd and Robert S. Lynd's studies of ‘Middletown,’ e.g. Muncie, Indiana [Middletown: A Study of Contemporary American Culture, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1929,Google Scholar and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1937]Google Scholarspoke of‘anthropology coming home.’ Warner's, Lloyd studies of Newburyport, Massachusetts-the ‘Yankee City Series’ [4 vols, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1941–47]Google Scholar -and Marquand's, John P. novel, Point of No Return [Boston, Little Brown, 1961] which meant to show how little Warner's behavioral explanations explained, come to mind as reflexive studies of ‘us’ by ‘us.’ Both the Lynds and Warner studied downwardly mobile WASPS whose culture became more visible as their power decreased.Google Scholar

⁴³ Madan's, Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir, Bombay, Asia Publishing House, 1965, was based on participant-observer field work in his own community.Google ScholarMadan's decision to study Kashmiri pandits ran counter to an early post-colonial norm articulated by M. N. Srinivas, by the mid-1950s the ‘doyen’ of Indian anthropologists. In the face of limited resources and a related but more vague sense that anthropology should serve national development goals, Srinivas advised his students and colleagues to do field work ‘… in a section of [Indian] society different from that to which he [sic] belongs.’ Srinivas, Social Change, p. 156. The ‘other’ it seems could be found at home. According to Srinivas, India's ‘sharp stratification system and regional diversity … [can]compensate …for the non-availability of [the] resources …’ British anthropologists could command to do field work in distant, alien places. Field work could and should be done in Indian society. Social Change, pp. 155–6. André Béteille, from Bengal and Srinivas's most distingushed student, earned his credentials by doing participant-observer field work in a Tamil village where he found ‘class’ as well as caste.Google ScholarSee his Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1965.Google ScholarOf course, Anthropology as an academic discipline had gotten started several generations before independence in 1947 but it was an officially useful descriptive ethnography ['the castes and/or tribes’ of x, y, or z place] or sociology [again castes or tribes were the principal subjects] rather than as Malinowski-style field work. Patrick Geddes established the first Indian department of Sociology at the University of Bombay in 1919. In 1924 Geddes was succeeded by G. S. Ghurye who was trained at the London School of Economics and at Cambridge University where he studied with W. H. R. Rivers who appreciated but did not teach or practice Malinowski-style field work.Google Scholar For an insightful analytic account of anthropology's career in India before and after independence, see Madan, T. N., ‘Part One: Pathfinders’ in Pathways: Approaches to the Study of Society in India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 3–107, and Amrit Srinivasan's more polemical version of the preindependence story, ‘The Subject of Fieldwork: Malinowski and Gandhi,’ pp. 2745–52Google ScholarM. N. Srinivas, who was committed to field work, established the first post-colonial departments, initially at the M.S. University of Baroda, then at Delhi University in 1959. With his move to Delhi, Anthropology can be said to have ‘arrived’ literally and figuratively at the ‘center.’ Second only to Economists, Anthropologists became the gurus not only of ‘development’ and ‘rule’ but also of ongoing debates about values and identity.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Oxford, The Clarendon Press.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Srinivas's Oxford dissertation was based on data collected earlier for the first of two Ph.D.s, a 900-page 1944 Bombay University dissertation done under G. S. Ghurye who had suggested the Coorg topic to him. After Radcliffe-Brown's retirement, Srinivas completed the dissertation under Evans-Pritchard. The Oxford dissertation and the 1952 book retained Radcliffe-Brown's functionalist theory, including a functionalist theory of religion and its relation to society. See T. N. Madan's chapter in Pathways, ‘An Introduction to M. N. Srinivas's Oeuvre,’ pp. 37–51, for a more detailed analytic and evaluative account of Srinivas's career and contributions.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Madan, , ‘… M. N. Srinivas's Oeuvre,’ in Pathways, p. 48.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Srinivas, M. N., Social Change in Modern India, Berkeley, University of Calfornia Press, 1966.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ T. N. Madan, in a letter dated 6 April 1993 commenting on a draft of this article, pointed out that Srinivas ‘actually says in the last chapter of his Social Change book, that the anthropologist must begin away from home.’ Madan queries this view in his recently published Pathways. There he questions whether M. N. Srinivas as well as Levi-Strauss and Louis Dumont are right in believing that the only way for anthropologists to acquire the allegedly requisite ‘anthropological doubt’ for studying their own culture is through participant-observer study of a remote [‘the remoter the better’] culture. Madan doubts that ‘the only way one can learn about other [remote] cultures is through personal field work. This is the well-known mystique of “participant observation” and plays down both the volume of extant, good ethnographical literature and what one can learn from studying it’ [P- 159]. Madan seems to agree with Srinivas, Levi-Strauss, and Louis Dumont that ‘self ethnography’ of the kind he did among his own community of Kashmiri pandits requires knowledge of an ‘other’ but holds that such knowledge can be acquired from books—i.e. quality descriptive ethnographies—as well as from the personalfield work that these luminaries insist upon.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Madan, , ‘… Strangers,’ p. 134.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ ‘On Critical Self-awareness,’ in Pathways, p. 157.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Madan, , ‘… Strangers,’ p. 134.Google Scholar

⁵² ‘… Strangers,’ p. 135.Google Scholar

⁵³ Ch. 8, ‘On Critical Self-awareness,’ in Pathways, p. 158.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Madan, , ‘… Strangers,’ pp. 138 and 140–1.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ In Encounter and Experience.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Herzfeld, is characterizing his position in Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1987, where he examined ‘the marginal position of Greek ethnography—and European ethnography generally—in the field of anthropology, arguing that contemporary Greek identity and theoretical anthropology share parallel ideological pressures and conflicts related to the issue of self and other, of insider and outsider.’ Explaining the title of his book, Herzfeld recently commented that ‘I do see Greece as a looking-glass in which anthropology can view itself. The book attempts to shed some light on Greek society and culture and to show how the tension between anthropological theory and ethnography is equivalent to the tension between the idealized neoclassical reading of Greek culture and the actual, intimate experience of everyday life in Greece, where people are deeply concerned about questions like whether they should be considered "Europeans” or "Orientals….” ‘ Interview with Michael Herzfeld on the occasion of being awarded the 1994 J. I. Staley prize in Ideas in Anthropology: 1994 Annual Report of the School of American Research, pp. 3 4–5.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ ‘On Critical Self-awareness,’ in Pathways, pp. 159–60.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ These themes are developed in ‘On Critical Self-awareness’ from accounts of the work of Levi-Strauss and Louis Dumont.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ My italics. ‘On Critical Self-awareness,’ in Pathways, p. 158.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 160. Madan cites James Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths,’ in James Clifford and George Marcus eds, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1986, p. 7.

⁶¹ The reference is to Nandy's, AshisThe Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1983.Google Scholar

⁶² ‘On Critical Self-awareness,’ in Pathways, pp. 160–1.Google ScholarMadan, elaborated an alternate view of Indian society and culture to that found in the European-colonial canon in Non-Renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1987.Google Scholar

⁶³ ‘On Critical Self-awareness,’ in Pathways, p. 163.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Ibid., pp. 165–6.

⁶⁵ See Young, Michael W., The Ethnography of Malinowski. Young quotes W. H. R. Rivers's call as of 1913 for ‘… intensive field work … [wherein] the worker lives for a year or more among a community of perhaps four or five hundred people and studies every detail of their life and culture; in which he comes to know every member of the community personally … [and] studies every feature of life and custom in concrete detail and by means of the vernacular language….Google Scholar It is only by such work that it is possible to discover the incomplete and even misleading character of much of the vast mass of survey work which forms the existing material of anthropology’ [p. 7], quoted by Kuper, A., Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School 7922–1972, London, Allen Lane, 1973, at p. 20.Google ScholarYoung continues: ‘Now none of Malinowski mentors [Westermarck, Seligman, nor yet Rivers himself] had managed to fulfill to the letter this prescription for first hand, intensive research, and no one knew what its consequences would be…. [Malinowski] was able to persuade a whole generation of his followers that "social anthropology began in the Trobriand Islands in 1914” ‘ [p. 7].Google Scholar

⁶⁶ ‘It is clear,’ Geertz, Clifford tells us in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1988Google Scholar, ‘ that in … [Foucaultian] terms, anthropology is pretty much entirely on the side of “literary” discourses rather than “scientific” ones…. ethnographies tend to look at least as much like romances as they do like lab reports….’ [p. 8]. mar Singh's ethnography is more in accord with Michael M. J. Fisher's characterization of today's anthropology: ‘Anthropological accounts step into an ongoing stream of representations. Anthropology in the late twentieth century is no longer the “discovery” of terra nova or undescribed cultures, but rather a method of informed critique, pursued often by placing into strategic and disjunctive juxtaposition different representations or perspectives so as to throw light upon the social contest of their production and meaning, and to draw out their implications.’ ‘Working through the other: The Jewish, Spanish, Turkish, Iranian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, German Unconscious of Polish Culture-or-One hand clapping: dialogue, silences, and the mourning of Polish romanticism,’ in Marcus, George E., ed., Perilous States: Conversations on Culture, Politics, and Nation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 187.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Geertz, , Works and Lives, pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ A more extended version of the argument can be found in Rudolph and Rudolph, ‘Becoming a Diarist.’Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Quotations are from diary entry ‘Shanhai Khan, December 18, 1900 and Jaipore, Friday, 7th July 1905 [continued at July 11] NOTES ABOUT MY LAST VISIT TO MOUNT ABU.’Google Scholar

⁷⁰ ‘Dehra Doon, Friday 21st October 1904. NOTES ABOUT MY LAST VACATIONS, XXVI. Some Anecdotes.’Google Scholar

⁷¹ New York, Ticknor and Fields, 1984.Google Scholar

⁷² The meaning and consequences of liminality, thought of here as reflexive selfrepresentation in the context of living between cultures, is theorized and illustrated with evidence from the Amar Singh diary in Rudolph and Rudolph, ‘Setting the Table.’Google ScholarFisher, Michael H.'s ‘Indian Autobiography from the Frontier: Traveling from Patna to Brighton’ [unpublished paper, Oberlin, Ohio, 1994] analyzes the remarkable careers and writing of Shaikh Din Muhammad [1759–1851]. At 24, in 1784, he emigrated from ‘Bengal’ to Cork, Ireland, and early in the nineteenth century to London and Brighton.Google Scholar Fisher frames his analysis of SDM's remarkable literary self-representations in terms of Pratt's, Mary Louise concepts [in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writings and Transculturation, London, Routledge, 1992] of‘contact zones’ and ‘transculturation,’ terms I find reminiscent of liminality. Fisher provides a valuable bibliography [in his footnote 55] of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ‘transcultural’ travel and autobiographical writing by colonial subjects.Google Scholar

⁷³ ‘Jaipore, Friday, 7th October 1904 [contnued 9, 12, 14, 16, and 19] NOTES ABOUT MY LAST VISIT TO SATHEEN, V. The Marriage, 27. Epilogue.’Google Scholar

⁷⁴ Tuesday, 2 December 1902.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Diarists wrote, Felicity Nussbaum tells us in ‘Toward Conceptualizing Diary,’ on ‘the perplexing boundary between the private and public worlds…. it is in that privatization of self, that division between public and private self, that journal is born. More permanent than spoken speech, it is a private working out of what cannot and is not ready to be published …’. A private and personal revelation, the diary records what cannot ‘… be spoken to anyone except the self…. a confession to the self with only the self as auditor and without public authority…’. On the other hand, writing a diary ‘… becomes necessary at the point when the subject begins to believe that it cannot be intelligible to itself without written articulation and representation.’ It is a way, Nussbaum continues, ‘to expose the subject's hidden discourse, perhaps in the hope of “knowing” the self when the subject is still sole censor and critic of his or her own discourse. Before diaries were published, they provided a way to keep the truth about oneself out of the tangled skein of power …’. Nussbaum, Felicity A., ‘Toward Conceptualizing Diary,’ in Olney, James, ed., Studies in Autobiography, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 134–5.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Susanne Rudolph and I in ‘Becoming a Diarist’ discuss the limited sense in which diaries were written or known in pre-British India. Amar Singh, like educated Indians and Britishers of his time, is innocent of sub-continental diaries such as the Baburnama or the Tuzhuki Jehangiri. Barath Ram Nathji, who holds an Indian university degree and has travelled in Britain and on the continent, encourages Amar Singh to keep a diary in part because he knows as an educator that English public schools are using them as a means of discipline and self-control.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ Nussbaum, , ‘Toward Conceptualizing Diary,’ p. 134.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ According to Felicity A. Nussbaum the diary in seventeenth- and early eighteenth- century Europe ‘was largely a private document’ but by the nineteenth century it had become both a private and a public document. Ibid., p. 131. I have already alluded to Alain Corbin's and Anne Martin-Fugier's accounts of the rise of the diary in Michelle Perrot, ed., A History of Private Life, IV. Mallon, Thomas in A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries argues that ‘no one ever kept a diary for just himself.’ Diaries can't be written without a public meaning because ‘the words have to start going someplace … ‘. Mallon is confident, too, that diaries will be read. It may be a great great granddaughter or the person to whom she sold the house ‘but an audience will turn up.’Google Scholar

⁷⁹ Clifford, and Marcus, , eds, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.Google Scholar

⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 3.

⁸¹ Ibid., p. 2 4.

⁸² Ibid., pp. 2 and 4.

⁸³ Ibid., p. 25.

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 8.

⁸⁵ Comments Written on End Papers of Ms Volume I. The full text of Amar Singh's response to Ram Nathji's comments at the end of the bound volume for 1899 are given below. Ram Nathji was the only person allowed to read the diary. He did so for the first three years, pencilling in comments in the margins and writing a summary comment at the end. ‘My dear Master Sahib, I am indeed very grateful for the trouble you have taken to read the whole of my diary and [to] have written remarks on it. I feel very much honoured by it. You know this perfectly, that you are the only man who has yet been at liberty to do what you like with these pages which, though quite rot and a record of butchery [accounts of hunting expeditions] as you say, can yet put me to great inconvenience if known to bad characters. I ought surely to have written about the famine but you must bear in mind that no opportunities were given me to study or watch it…. What I have written is of which I am an eye witness or have heard from very reliable sources.’Google Scholar

⁸⁶ Clifford, and Marcus, , eds, Writing Culture, p. 14.Google Scholar