Unmaking the ‘great tradition’: Ethnography, national culture and area studies

This essay contextualizes and interrogates Milton Singer's When a Great Tradition Modernizes, an influential study of Sanskritic Hinduism and its elite exponents in urban south India. Singer's fieldwork (1954–1964) depended heavily on the assistance of an Indian Sanskritist, V. Raghavan. I focus on their collaboration as it is represented in the published works of both, and consider its implications for South Asia area studies in the US. In their reliance on ethnographic methods, area studies projects offered transnational sites for the consolidation of nationalist discourses—for while Raghavan strategically used ethnographic interactions to fashion and disseminate elite nationalism in India, Singer used India (as mediated by Raghavan) as a “case” in the formulation of civilizational studies and theories of modernization. Analysis of this case illuminates the current contradictions generated by area studies’ reliance on paradigms of nationhood. Deconstruction of the “nation” is coupled with reconstruction of national imaginaries and nationalist identity politics, and these contradictions are realized in both theoretical discourses and institutional practices.

Key words:

• Area Studies
• Ethnography
• India
• Nationalism
• Sanskritization