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1 results

  • Chapter 1 - Ethnographic Recension

  • from Part I - Epistemic Habits
  • Baidik Bhattacharya, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
  • Book:
    Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters
    Published online:
    19 January 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024, pp 53-81

  • Summary

    In Chapter 1, I explore in detail – through official and personal papers, published translations, letters exchanged between colonial officials, prefaces and commentaries, and so on – how the Company officials, in close collaboration with their local pandits and munshis, produced a tradition of what I call ethnographic recension that anchored an ethnographic world within the very space of a legal or literary text. Coming between the Renaissance humanists such as Politian, Desiderius Erasmus, and Joseph Scaliger on the one hand and nineteenth-century textual scholars such as Karl Lachmann on the other, these colonial administrators introduced a new model of textual authority by combining philology and ethnology that was the first move to mark the newness of colonial knowledge. This ethnographic world was seen as a guarantor of textual authenticity, but its very inclusion set off the dual career of the literary sovereign – its role in defining what is literary, and its participation in political sovereignty.