Castes of Mind by Dirks Nicholas B.;

Author:Dirks, Nicholas B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2001-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

The Colonized Body as Ethnographic Text

In 1906, Thurston published a long ethnographic work while he was in the middle of his labors for the ethnographic survey. Entitled Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, this work consisted of a series of essays, some previously published in the Madras museum Bulletin, on a variety of ethnographic subjects that Thurston thought held intrinsic interest.57 Perhaps Thurston also thought that these essays could not be readily contained by the format of the ethnographic survey.

The book begins with two long essays, the first on marriage customs, the second on death ceremonies, that look like compilations of material that had been collected on a caste-by-caste basis. Caste seems slightly less important in the third essay, on “omens, evil eye, charms, animal superstitions, sorcery, etc.,” since the ethnographic material is presented as instances of a general set of beliefs and practices. But in subsequent chapters the organizing principle is no longer the conventional frame of caste, and the subjects seem no longer to be standard anthropological fare. The fourth chapter is entitled “Deformity and Mutilation,” the next “Torture in Bygone Days,” followed by such other chapters as “Slavery,” “Firewalking,” “Hookswinging,” “Infanticide,” and “Meriah Sacrifice.” If the caste-by-caste entries of Thurston’s ethnographic survey volumes focus on the social (which for the British in India was caste), these essays instead focus on the body.

Thurston’s Ethnographic Notes can be seen as the critical link in the genealogy that connected official anthropology with the kinds of investigative enquiries and reports that the British collected in their routine administration of Indian society. These chapters are in large parts encyclopedic collections of official material that was generated by the colonial interest in suppressing practices such as hookswinging, slavery, and torture. In Thurston’s introduction to his volumes on the Castes and Tribes, he had written that he had followed the scheme for the ethnographic survey that had recommended that he “supplement the information obtained from representative men and by their own enquiries by ‘researches into the considerable mass of information which lies buried in official reports, in the journals of learned Societies, and in various books.’ Of this injunction full advantage has been taken, as will be evident from the abundant crop of references in foot-notes.”58 But it is in the Ethnographic Notes that we can see the extraordinary extent of the compact between official colonial reports and official colonial ethnography.

Hookswinging, as we saw in the last chapter, occasioned considerable official concern both in the 1850s and the 1890s, in large part in response to missionary pressure on the government to abolish the rite. Thurston’s ethnographic essay on hookswinging is in fact little more than a compilation of the kinds of writings on the custom that were used to recommend the abolition of what was seen as a barbaric rite by the British, and at the end of the century by many upper-caste/class Indian officials as well. The essay begins by quoting a government report of 1854, and notes that in 1852 two men had

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