‘Social Anthropology is concerned not with stones and bones but rather Marx and Spencer’—Isaac Schapera’s comment comes to one’s mind when reading Arjun Appadorai’s book since he is also an anthropologist with a differ¬ence. In his introduction, the author calls himself an ethno-historian and clarifies his fundamental differences with the functionalist school of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown who regard social struc¬ture as a mere mirror-image of culture which is defined as a set of established customs and usages. Appadorai adopts the far more sophisticated stand of Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner and others and calls the processual analysis of cultural values and norms being constantly dis¬turbed as modified by the reality which creates ‘conflict situations’ as ‘social drama’ after Turner. Thus the author operates at two levels, dealing first with the established insti¬tutional norms in the temple of Sri Parthasarathi Swami in Triplicane in the contexts of power, ritual and authority and then attempting an ethno-historical analysis of its dramatic movements of con¬flict, especially under colonial rule. The historical past gets linked with the ethnographic present.
July-August 1983, volume 8, No 1