Introduction : passage to India -- Annals of the archive : ethnographic notes on the sources of history -- Autobiography of an archive -- Preface to the second edition of the Hollow crown -- Castes of mind -- Ritual and resistance : subversion as a social fact -- The policing of tradition : colonialism and anthropology in southern India -- Imperial sovereignty -- Bringing the company back in : the scandal of early global capitalism -- The idea of empire -- In near ruins -- G.S. Ghurye and the politics of sociological knowledge -- South Asian studies : futures past -- Franz Boas and the American university : a personal account -- Scholars and spies : worldly knowledge and the predicament of the university -- The opening of the American mind
Summary
This volume uses a scholar's intellectual journey to India to look at how, between 1970 and the end of the twentieth century, the discipline of history turned its focus from high politics and formal intellectual history toward ordinary lives and cultural rhythms. It shows how, during this time, the disciplines of history and anthropology draw closer together, with historians paying more attention to social and cultural factors and the significance of everyday experiences
