Thomas R. Trautmann

Time : histories and ethnologies

Time is the subject of several rather different conversations. Some of them, such as that of the cosmologists and theoretical physicists, are nearly impenetrable to nonspecialists; others have an easy popular appeal. In this volume, editors Diane Owen Hughes and Thomas R. Trautmann collect nine essays on the related but distinct conversation about time that takes place at the intersection of history and ethnology.From the standpoint of Enlightenment reason, time should be a universal and uniform category of understanding. Yet in fact, this category is understood in different cultures in extremely diverse ways. The historians and anthropologists who contribute to this volume address this problem not in the abstract and the general but in contexts that are determinate and highly particular. Individual essays address the sense of time in a wide range of historical and present cultures, from the Yucatan to the Iparakuyo Maasai. Their discussion of whether nonuniform time is to be understood as socially constructed or as determined by relations of production, as the mystification of privilege or as cultural design, differs from philosophical discussions of time in that the real-world standard to which it submits itself is always culturally plural.Diane Owen Hughes is Associate Professor of History, University of Michigan. Thomas R. Trautmann is Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History, University of Michigan.

The whole history of kinship terminology in three chapters Before Morgan, Morgan, and after Morgan

The article questions the current consensus that kinship terminologies evolve from something like the Dravidian to something like the English terminology, examining it over three time periods. Before Morgan the study of kinship terminology was embedded within a comparative study of core vocabularies to determine historic relations among nations (e.g. Leibniz). Morgans breakthrough was to disembed the terms of kinship from the vocabulary list and conceptualize them as a set. His vision of their evolution had two phases. Before the revolutionary expansion of ethnological time in the mid-19th century, he developed an evolutionary view of the Indo-European kinship terminology that was very acute but tied to a short chronology for world history that the time revolution shortly exploded; after the time revolution he conceived the Iroquois and the English (as types of the Classificatory and the Descriptive) terminologies as an evolutionary series caused by successive reformations of the marriage rule. After Morgan, Dravidian and its structural neighbors have come to play the role of evolutionary starting-point. The article concludes with reasons to be skeptical of the current consensus and ways to move forward.

Dr Johnson and the pandits: Imagining the perfect dictionary in colonial Madras

Acknowledgements: This article could not have been written without the help of Professor Velcheru Narayana Rao of the University of Wisconsin, the well-known scholar of Telugu literature, with whom I discussed the sources and argument of this article at length. Narayana Rao’s immense erudition is equalled only by the generosity with which he puts it at the disposal of friends. It is a pleasant duty to register my thanks for his unstinting kindness. I

Consanguineous marriage in Pali literature.

Instances of cross-cousin marriage in Pali literature are found only in the post-canonical stratum and are unsupported or in some cases contradicted by non-Pali versions of the same stories. They reflect, therefore, the kinship practices of early Ceylon, not North India. Eighteen cases of cross-cousin marriage among Ceylonese kings are almost equally divided between the patrilateral (fathers sisters daughter) and matrilateral (mothers brothers daughter) varieties, showing that the rule was bilateral. Both cross-cousin and parallel-kin (agnatic) marriages were entered into by the kings of Ceylon to insure purity of descent and the internal harmony of the large, essentially endogamous royal family.