INDIA AS A PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM: MCKIM MARRIOTT AND THE COMPARATIVE ENTERPRISE.

• Author: GEROW, EDWIN

McKim Marriott's recent efforts to formulate a theory of Indian civilization--which have been seen largely in rather narrow and anthropological terms--itself invite comparison with the works of other theorists of culture, notably Louis Dumont (with whom Marriott has had sometimes acrimonious dispute) and Oswald Spengler (with whom he has not, but whose work, in its tendency towards extreme cultural relativism, shows surprising similarities of conception). Marriott's purview is equally comprehensive, and raises again, perhaps in more "modern" terms, all the questions fundamental to such vast programs, which have influenced the Western historical tradition since Vico and Hegel. In this discussion of the comparative enterprise and Marriott's place in it, appeal can usefully be made to the "organon" of Richard McKeon, as a tool for conceptualizing (or disambiguating) the points of ambiguity that make a variety of theoretical positions possible or even necessary. Only such a meta-language gives one license to "co mpare comparisons."

Marriott's work, little known outside the anthropological bailiwick, has implications for anyone interested in the comparison of cultures--and in such current hot-button topics as whether one can or should even try to "read" the literature of another culture from within the confines of one's own. Marriott's work, still in formation, is notable for the rigor with which it attempts to state the principles involved in apprehending an "alien" culture, and deserves a wider audience, both among Indianists and philosophers.

Publication of this symposium of articles by Marriott and some of his students provides an occasion to review what has been tried so far--especially inasmuch as the lead article, by Marriott himself, summarizes, in the most general form yet attempted, the principles his work presumes. Much correspondence has taken place between Marriott and the author, in which Marriott has clarified his formulations in yet more comprehensive terms. It is to be hoped that this review-article, even as tentative as it is, and that correspondence will encourage further publication in this vein.

MCKIM MARRIOTT'S RECENT EFFORTS to develop an anthropology sensitive to local modes of understanding societies (in this case, Indian self-understandings) are consonant with intellectual tendencies prominent in the last third of the twentieth century--among Western academics, at least: sensitivity to the plurality of cultures; suspicion of monotonic ideologies thought to reflect "hegemonies"; and attention to the claims of the excluded "other" to speak in its own voice. Such matters have, of course, been debated widely, both by Indologists and those less gifted--the nature and function of karma and other seemingly "indigenous" Indian categories; the peculiarities of Indian social arrangements, notably caste;2 the unique Indian contribution (if any) to contemporary world culture, etc., usually framed in terms of a "spiritual" component. [3] In Marriott's case, these tendencies have been molded also in the peculiar self-reflective crucible of the University of Chicago, which has seen itself as a pioneer in deve loping contrastive approaches, both in teaching and research, to the study of the three major non-Western civilizations, approaches whose distinctive character lies in their combining traditional (or "orientalist") classicism with hands-on inquiry into current social and political realities. Marriott's proposals have been reviewed sparsely, almost entirely by other anthropologists, and, apart from his own circle, not all that favorably. [4] Given the evident contribution of classicists like J. A. B. van Buitenen and A. K. Ramanujan to Marriott's thought, and his effort to engage the thought of the other important Indianist who has sought to investigate the gap between "modern" social theory and indigenous or classical categories--Louis Dumont--it is somewhat surprising that Marriott's project has not been commented on from an "orientalist" perspective. The little that has been written in this vein can hardly be considered serious. A distinguished Indian colleague, for example, has chastened Marriott for allow ing into his discourse Sanskrit adjectives incorrectly formed according to the rules of Panini's grammar (read, "tamasa" not "tamasika"). [5] It should be stressed at the outset that Marriott's project, which is still very much in process, is a serious effort to think through the problems of cross-cultural comparison in a rigorously responsible and self-reflective fashion. Whatever its problems--and there are many--Marriott's work stands apart (indeed, in the august company of Louis Dumont's) as a contribution to Western philosophical literature on the morphology of civilizations--a distinguished tradition of inquiry that goes back at least to Vico and Hegel (if not to Herodotus).

1. Marriott seems at times to shift his ground as his critics weigh in against this or that aspect of his stilldeveloping project: the absence of a comprehensive statement of his theory is a major drawback, it must be admitted, and its often fragmentary presentation invites caviling. It was his lengthy review of Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus [6] that seemed to bring into focus the need for an "ethnosociology" of India more adequate than Dumont's "flawed" theory--a need then given positive voice in an article Marriott co-authored with Ronald laden, "Toward an Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems." [7] The review, which in sum was quite critical (in both senses) of Dumont's method and conclusions, has, of course, made it difficult subsequently to dissociate their two names--though Marriott tends to belittle Dumont's contribution to his own thought, and denies that there has been any real "dialectic" between them. Still, for our purposes, which, I repeat, are Indological rather than social-scientific, this controversy does still serve as a very useful entree into Marriott's views. There seem to be two levels of dissatisfaction expressed in his long review of Dumont's work, and subsequently: speaking empirically, Dumont's top-down, "ideological" analysis, while often coherent with (and indeed, based on) the textual tradition (therefore demonstrating a unified civilization--but the demonstration is spurious), cannot confront or account for the observed diversity of behavior at the micro-level that painstaking fieldwork discovers--the strictly personal level, often inconsistent from village to village; further, a theory based on "ideology" alone cannot, according to Marriott, discover an "Indian" sociology that starts from "Indian" categories-that is, categories Indians, in their concrete variety, recognize and use in realizing their own culture; at best, it will capture only an aspect of the complex--either the self-serving idealizations of a dominant group that have found their way into a "literature," itself, o f course, a province of the dominant; or, what is worse, it will simply reveal categories proper to the researcher's own "ideology" naively taken for granted.

   Marriott's effort to transcend what he regards as the overly simple and "dichotomous" work of Dumont shows him to be more interested, as were the great philosophers of history mentioned, in a general theory of cultural diversity that will both be universal--capable of apprehending a variety of cultures globally, as variations on a theme that may be stated formally; and essential--capable of ascertaining the differentia (or differentiae) proper to or characteristic of a given culture, taken singly. By contrast, Marriott's multivalent analysis presents itself as capable of mapping almost infinite varieties of cultural expression-- an "interactive" model that Marriott has attempted to visualize through his "cube," which is defended as a source of questions and hypotheses relevant to the social scientist's investigations--a philosopher's stone, so to speak, providing "topics" of inquiry--rather than as an icon of some sort having intrinsic value.

   Constructing a theoretical social science for a culture requires somewhat more than providing a meaningful cultural account: it requires building from the culture's natural categories a general system of concepts that can be formally defined in relation to each other; it requires developing words and measures that can be used rigorously for description analysis and explanation within that culture; and it especially requires developing deductive strategies that can generate hypotheses for empirical tests in terms that will be analytically powerful enough to define all the major parameters of living in that culture without violating the culture's ontology, its presuppositions, or its epistemology. (p. 4)

2. Let it be said at the outset that Marriott, like Dumont, is a comparativist in the very best (which is also a "Western") sense of the word. Impressionistic oppositions, whether the East be "spiritual"--or just inscrutable, are merely anecdotal and express little but the unreflective prejudices of the speaker. If comparison is possible, judgments must be grounded in explicit and universally intelligible criteria, open to anyone who considers the matter with an open mind. How Marriott reconciles this universalizing agenda with his announced design of discovering "Hindu categories" of thought is a major concern of the present essay.

   Marriott, on the other hand, is not to be confused with the "culture theorists" of recent vintage, for whom the study of cultural difference is essentially a pretext to criticism of any and all social arrangements that sit ill with the usually liberal and "post-modern" presuppositions of the theorist; these arrangements, of course, are nearly always seen as the result of hostile or alien "domination"-- "colonialists" are still conveniently available in this role of "other"--if not, then any privileged subgroup will do, so long as it has succeeded in imposing its interests...