I'm happy to be the recipient of an award recognizing the work of scholars who deploy literary and experiential resources in pursuit of meaning. And I am delighted that there is a conference-related group institutionalizing this honor. On this auspicious occasion, I thought I would offer a few remarks about my current work.
During each of the 11 years Lloyd and I have spent in India, I wrote home weekly letters addressed to “Dear All”—about ten letters per research year, each five or six pages long—about six hundred pages in all. I'm in the process of editing these letters.
What can I say in justification of this enterprise? What kind of communication is a “letter”? How does it fit into the work of a comparative political scientist? What is its methodological implication?
A letter is first of all a personal document, its form shaped by the persona of the writer. That was even more true before the day of the typewriter, when the persona was symbolically present in the handscript of the writer. A personal document expresses first-person knowledge, what “I know” by virtue of my experience, frankly tinged by the subjectivity of the writer. A personal document is not disciplined by the conventions of academic writing—documents, graphs, footnotes, which are in the service of objectivity. No amount of strategic devices used by social scientists to obscure the subjectivity of the author can hide the “I” who writes.
The accounts in the letters I am editing take a number of different forms. There is the anthropology of everyday life, as when I use Indian traffic patterns—the propensity to straddle the center line, the reluctance to come to a full stop, the pervasive game of chicken—to cast light on political negotiation, to cast light on what Lloyd I. Rudolph called the continually negotiated order. The traffic becomes my grain of sand. Some letters employ the microsubjectivity of the letter writer to give meaning to macropolitics, as when I describe the impact on everyday life, including our life, of Indira Gandhi's emergency government in 1975. The letters permit me to experiment with generalizations whose truth will have to be explored in a wider arena than my letter-life—as when I try out a theory of the old and the new Indian federalism and ideas of sharing sovereignty more generally.
The form of my letters was shaped by the audience and by the definition of the epistolary situation. The audience was not readers of the APSR, not graduate students in an afternoon seminar. Rather, they were readers of the New York Times, intelligent nonacademics, friends and siblings and parents and colleagues, with a good admixture of Ph.D.s and public intellectuals. The definition of the situation was not a demand for “contributions to knowledge,” as in an academic publisher's inquiry, available especially to seekers of knowledge, but the expressive transferral of experience to soulmates. It's an audience with standards, but permissive, leaving room for me to try out new ideas, to be playful without having to pay the penalties that a professional readership can extract. It was an audience that had no special knowledge of India, forcing me to privilege description and to specify the obvious rather than assume shared experience.
The letters provided a vehicle to evolve the sort of method and style characteristic of area scholarship. Area scholars are Burkians, not Lockians. They are practitioners of specificity and contextualized knowledge, starting with the presumption that “my” people are particular. They reject liberal universalism, reject the doctrine that all humanity is the same.Footnote 1
What many area scholars had in common with Burke was their respect for the dignity, worth, and meaning of the other. That respect could not be enacted except via recognition of the distinctiveness of the other. Conveying the feel and texture of a place and of its human relationships required the specificity that is achieved by entering into the life of the other, under some circumstances “becoming” the other—as when we speak their language. The narrative form of the “letter” favors particularity over generality, and made me resist treating local thought and practice as instances of some abstract universal. The ideal letter, which I did not achieve, would aim to portray (pace Isaiah Berlin) “the differences, the contrasts, the collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a precision of concrete imagery”Footnote 2 not found in other modes of communication.
To conclude, the narrative form that I am now editing has implications that are congenial to my and your [the IMM Conference Group] methodological preferences.
