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

This essay contextualizes and interrogates Milton Singer's When a Great Tra dition Modernizes, an influential study of Sanskritic Hinduism and its elit e exponents in urban south India. Singer's fieldwork (1954-1964) depended h eavily on the assistance of an Indian Sanskritist, V. Raghavan. I focus on their collaboration as it is represented in the published works of both, an d consider its implications for South Asia area studies in the US. In their reliance on ethnographic methods, area studies projects offered transnatio nal sites for the consolidation of nationalist discourses-for while Raghava n strategically used ethnographic interactions to fashion and disseminate e lite nationalism in India, Singer used India (as mediated by Raghavan) as a "case" in the formulation of civilizational studies and theories of modern ization. Analysis of this case illuminates the current contradictions gener ated by area studies' reliance on paradigms of nationhood. Deconstruction o f the "nation" is coupled with reconstruction of national imaginaries and n ationalist identity politics, and these contradictions are realized in both theoretical discourses and institutional practices.