The Other From Within: Indian Anthropologists and the Birth of the Nation

这个项目追溯了人类学在印度作为一门学科的发展，以及在印度向独立（1900- 1970）过渡期间作为国家形成工具的发展。尽管在20世纪70年代之后，后殖民研究在世界范围内产生了影响，但南亚次大陆的人类学历史相对来说尚未被探索。以前的工作主要集中在殖民民族学家和西方人类学家的著作的影响。相比之下，我们的项目从思想、制度、知识分子、他们的主题以及人类学知识形式的全球生产和利用之间的相互作用等方面考察了这门学科本身。该项目通过研究西方人类学家和他们的印度同行之间的权力关系，并通过分析这些知识网络如何影响国家及其公民身份，将这些主题联系起来。我们对与印度人类学发展有关的制度、知识和个人历史知之甚少。相比之下，这门学科的历史在西方是一个成熟的领域，有专门的档案致力于这门学科的发展和它的著名学者。为了弥补这一差距，本项目将汇集分散的印度人类学创始人的收藏，以提供这个工作语料库和他们研究的社区的清晰愿景。同样，我们将保存、编辑并将视听材料转换为数字格式，这些数字格式属于dnt组织，如我们的合作伙伴Budhan Theatre和Sansmal Bhantu Samaj。在线资源将托管在项目网站和我们的合作伙伴Sahapedia的门户网站上。这一努力将告诉我们更多关于印度学者的教育和影响；他们是如何选择学习地点的？以及他们与线人和实验对象的关系。该项目包括三个主题：i)意识形态，ii)制度和iii)人类学主题。首先，我们将研究二十世纪早期的全球人类学趋势，如原始主义和科学种族主义，对试图理解他们作为殖民地臣民的生活和他们的社会在世界上的地位的印度人类学家提出了重大挑战的方式。以同样的方式，我们将研究诸如“文化相对主义”、“功能主义”和“发展”等概念的影响。从20世纪40年代到70年代，印度人类学家采用这些概念来理解种姓问题，并将其作为印度村庄现代化的一种方式。其次，我们将追溯各种机构的殖民和后殖民生活，这些机构试图根据种姓和种族等固定条件对印度人口的异质性进行分类和结构。在这里，我们将看看从殖民人口普查项目到1945年建立的印度人类学调查的过渡。同样，我们将调查尼赫鲁政府作为其五年计划的一部分创建的村庄发展人类学项目。这些努力具有强烈的人类学成分，并作为国家形成的工具发挥了关键作用。此外，由于这些项目是由福特基金会（Ford Foundation）等国际机构资助的，它们反映了来自美国而非英国的人类学新趋势。最后，我们将通过拼凑印度人类学家著作的历史、他们在该领域的经验和他们的合作网络（包括当地导游和“fixers”）来关注“人类学主题”。我们将为这些所谓的边缘主体追溯这些人类学项目的来生。我们的研究通过与达利特、原住民和非民族化部落社区成员的预先存在的关系，探索了这些群体作为人类学主题理解、谈判和构建其历史的方式，以及这在当代政治承认斗争方面的意义。

This project traces the development of anthropology as an academic discipline in India and as an instrument of state formation across the transition to independence (1900- 1970). Despite the impact of postcolonial studies worldwide after the 1970s, the history of anthropology in the subcontinent is relatively unexplored. Previous works have focused mainly on the impact of colonial ethnographers and on the writings of Western anthropologists. In contrast, our project examines the discipline itself in terms of ideas, institutions, intellectuals, their subjects, and the interplay between the global production and utilisation of anthropological forms of knowledge. The project connects these themes by examining the power relations between Western anthropologists and their Indian counterpart, and by analysing how these intellectual networks affect the state and its citizenship. We know very little about the institutional, intellectual and personal histories linked to the development of Indian anthropology. In comparison, the history of this discipline in the West is a mature field, with specialised archives dedicated to the growth of the discipline and its notable scholars. To bridge this gap, this project will assemble the scattered and dispersed collections of the founders of Indian anthropology to provide a clear vision of this corpus of work and the communities they studied. Similarly, we will preserve, edit and migrate audio-visual material into a digital format belonging to DNTs organisations such as our partners the Budhan Theatre and the Sansmal Bhantu Samaj. The online resources will be hosted on the project website and on the portal of our partner Sahapedia. This effort will tell us more about the education and influences of Indian scholars; how did they choose their sites of study; and what was their relationship to both their informants and subjects.The project covers three main themes: i) ideologies, ii) institutions and iii) anthropological subjects. First, we will examine the ways in which early twentieth-century global anthropological trends, such as primitivism and scientific racism, posed a significant challenge to Indian anthropologists trying to understand their lives as colonial subjects and the place of their society in the world. In the same way, we will study the influence of notions such as 'cultural relativism', 'functionalism' and 'development'. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Indian anthropologists adopted such concepts to comprehend questions of caste and as a way to modernise Indian villages. Second, we will trace the colonial and postcolonial lives of the various institutions which attempted to classify and structure the heterogeneity of the Indian population under fixed terms such as caste and race. Here we will look at the transition from the projects of colonial censuses to the establishment of the Anthropological Survey of India in 1945. Similarly, we will investigate the anthropological projects of village development created by the Nehru administration as part of their 5 year plans. These endeavours had strong anthropological components and played a key role as tools of state formation. Furthermore, as they were funded by international bodies such as the Ford Foundation, these projects reflected new anthropological trends coming from the US rather than Britain.Finally, we will focus on 'anthropological subjects' by piecing together a history of Indian anthropologists' writings, their experiences in the field and their networks of collaboration (including local guides and 'fixers'). We will trace the afterlives of these anthropological projects for their so-called marginal subjects. Through pre-existing relationships with members of the dalit, adivasi and denotified tribe communities, our research explores the ways these groups understood, negotiated and constructed their history as anthropological subjects, and what this means in terms of contemporary struggles for political recognition.