372 Administrative 372 Awards Appointments 372 In the News 372 New Appoint- 373 Books by Our People ments Readers 372 Promotions 374 In Memoriam

SPotlight Grain of Sand Award of 2009 Presented to Professors Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph The Interpretive Methodologies and many publications, solo and joint, are political” in their empirical material—that Methods Conference Group of the Ameri- several that engage themes close to the we applaud in recognizing can Political Science Association is proud heart of this Conference Group. and Susanne Rudolph with this award: to announce the creation of the “Grain of But more than these, it was a passage they have seen political worlds in grains Sand” Award to honor a political scientist in their co-authored “Writing India: A of sand and, moreover, have held these up whose contributions to interpretive stud- career overview” (India Review vol. 7, no. for scrutiny in ways that have enabled all ies of the political, and, indeed, to the dis- 4: 266–94), which I was recently reread- of us to see how it is our touch, our gaze, cipline itself, its ideas, and its persons, have ing, that caught my eye as symbolic of the our narrative, that creates both grain and been longstanding and merit special recog- contributions Lloyd and Susanne have sand in what we study. nition. made to “the interpretive.” They reflect The award draws its name from the there at one point on a comment of Vicky Dvora Yanow, for the 2009 Grain of Sand combined inspiration of the opening lines Hattam’s deploring the “‘deep and endur- Award committee of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” ing’ split between theory and empirical and Wislawa Szymborska’s “View with a research in political science” (270), noting S u sa n n e H o e b e r R u d o l p h : Grain of Sand.” It is intended to honor a that that split left “‘no space for the kind R e m a r k s o n R e c e i v i n g t h e scholar whose contributions demonstrate of work I aspire to’” (271). They experi- “ G rain of Sand” Awa r d creative and sustained engagement with enced the same split, they write, I’m happy to be the recipient of an questions of enduring political importance but not the disempowerment she expe- award recognizing the work of schol- from an interpretive perspective. Echoing rienced. Our teachers and, subsequently, ars who deploy literary and experiential Szymborska’s “We call it a grain of sand,” colleagues at Harvard . . . used theory to resources in pursuit of meaning. And I am the award underscores the centrality of frame and analyze historical and empirical delighted that there is a conference-relat- meaning-making in both the constitu- questions. We learned too . . . that theory, ed group institutionalizing this honor. tion and study of the political. Drawing on social and psychological as well as political, On this auspicious occasion, I thought I Blake’s “To see a world in a grain of sand,” helped to identify and answer questions. would offer a few remarks about my cur- the award honors the capacity of interpre- rent work. tive scholarship to embody and inspire During each of the 11 years Lloyd imaginative theorizing, the intentional and I have spent in India, I wrote home cultivation of new lines of sight through weekly letters addressed to “Dear All”— an expansion of literary and experiential about ten letters per research year, each resources, and the nourishing of a playful- five or six pages long—about six hun- ness of mind that is so necessary to the dred pages in all. I’m in the process of vitality of social science. editing these letters. We are honored that Lloyd Rudolph What can I say in justification of this and Susanne Rudolph have accepted the enterprise? What kind of communica- Grain of Sand award for 2010, the first tion is a “letter”? How does it fit into the one to be given. In the view of members work of a comparative political scien- of the award committee, they embody the tist? What is its methodological implica- attributes described above both person- . . . At the , theory tion? ally and in terms of their work. Emeriti at mattered. . . . Like M. Jourdain in Moliere’s A letter is first of all a personal docu- the University of Chicago, they began their Bourgeois Gentilhomme who was surprised ment, its form shaped by the persona of political science careers as graduate stu- to learn that he was speaking prose, we were the writer. That was even more true before dents at Harvard. Susanne is a past presi- surprised to find that we were speaking the day of the typewriter, when the perso- dent of APSA (2003–2004), as well as of the theory. (271) na was symbolically present in the hand- Association of Asian Studies. Their shared It is this eclecticism—this willingness script of the writer. A personal document interest in comparative led them to draw on research-relevant theoreti- expresses first-person knowledge, what “I to fieldwork in India, an engagement that cal ideas from whatever discipline and know” by virtue of my experience, frankly has continued over 40 years. Among their to bring those theories to bear on “the tinged by the subjectivity of the writer.

PS • April 2010 369 Pe o p l e

A personal document is not disciplined reject liberal universalism, reject the doc- know.”1 by the conventions of academic writing— trine that all humanity is the same.1 Amar Singh, like the Cree hunter, tells documents, graphs, footnotes, which are What many area scholars had in com- what he knows about what he has experi- in the service of objectivity. No amount of mon with Burke was their respect for the enced. Like the Cree hunter, his knowl- strategic devices used by social scientists dignity, worth, and meaning of the other. edge is situated and contextual; his voice to obscure the subjectivity of the author That respect could not be enacted except is located in time, place, and circumstance. can hide the “I” who writes. via recognition of the distinctiveness of The epistemology of subjective knowl- The accounts in the letters I am editing the other. Conveying the feel and texture edge stands in marked contrast with the take a number of different forms. There is of a place and of its human relationships epistemology of objective knowledge—i.e., the anthropology of everyday life, as when required the specificity that is achieved by knowledge based on a view from nowhere, I use Indian traffic patterns—the propen- entering into the life of the other, under generated by unmarked and unencum- sity to straddle the center line, the reluc- some circumstances “becoming” the oth- bered observers. tance to come to a full stop, the pervasive er—as when we speak their language. The James Clifford glossed the Cree hunt- game of chicken—to cast light on political narrative form of the “letter” favors partic- er’s concept of truth as “rigorous partial- negotiation, to cast light on what Lloyd I. ularity over generality, and made me resist ity.” Clifford reverses the conventional Rudolph called the continually negotiated treating local thought and practice as valuation of partial and impartial, treating order. The traffic becomes my grain of instances of some abstract universal. The partiality as the more desirable and impar- sand. Some letters employ the microsub- ideal letter, which I did not achieve, would tiality as the less desirable state. Rigor- jectivity of the letter writer to give mean- aim to portray (pace Isaiah Berlin) “the ous partiality recognizes and validates the ing to macropolitics, as when I describe differences, the contrasts, the collisions of situated, inflected nature of truth. Rather the impact on everyday life, including our persons and things and situations, each than denying or repressing the existen- life, of ’s emergency govern- apprehended in its absolute uniqueness tial character of the sociology of knowl- ment in 1975. The letters permit me to and conveyed with a degree of directness edge, rigorous partiality self-consciously experiment with generalizations whose and a precision of concrete imagery”2 not acknowledges that place, time, and cir- truth will have to be explored in a wider found in other modes of communication. cumstance shape why and how knowledge arena than my letter-life—as when I try To conclude, the narrative form that is acquired and what it is taken to mean. out a theory of the old and the new Indian I am now editing has implications that Clifford’s second signification for par- federalism and ideas of sharing sovereign- are congenial to my and your [the IMM tiality refers to that which is not whole, ty more generally. Conference Group] methodological pref- complete, or capable of being carried to The form of my letters was shaped by erences. completion. “Rigorous partiality” makes the audience and by the definition of the the epistemological claim that knowing epistolary situation. The audience was the whole truth is a capacity not given to N o t e s : not readers of the APSR, not graduate mortals. The best they can do is to strive 1. Udai Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in students in an afternoon seminar. Rather, 19th Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: Uni- for partial truths. they were readers of the New York Times, versity of Chicago Press, 1999). Early on in our work with the Amar intelligent nonacademics, friends and 2. Isaiah Berlin, quoted in Nicholas Kristof, “On Isaiah Singh diary, we recognized that subjec- Berlin,” New York Review of Books, February 25, siblings and parents and colleagues, with 2010, 27. tive knowledge posed a challenge to the a good admixture of Ph.D.s and public monopolistic claims of science to objec- intellectuals. The definition of the situ- tive knowledge. But we are not arguing in ation was not a demand for “contribu- reply to such monopoly claims for objec- tions to knowledge,” as in an academic tive knowledge that subjective knowledge publisher’s inquiry, available especially to T h e M a n y S e ats at t h e is the only form of knowledge, or even seekers of knowledge, but the expressive R o u n d Ta b l e o f K n ow l e d g e : that it should be taken to be the best or a transferral of experience to soulmates. It’s L l oy d I . R u d o l p h R e m a r k s better form of knowledge. We think there an audience with standards, but permis- o n R eceiving the G r a i n o f is room at the round table of knowledge sive, leaving room for me to try out new Sa n d Awa r d for the imaginative truths found in litera- ideas, to be playful without having to pay The many years Susanne Rudolph and ture, myth, and memory; for the archival the penalties that a professional reader- I spent editing and interpreting Amar truths of history; for the spiritual truths ship can extract. It was an audience that Singh’s diary for our book, Reversing the found in religions and religious experi- had no special knowledge of India, forcing Gaze, led us to reflect on the multiplicity ence; and for the aesthetic truths of the me to privilege description and to specify of forms of knowledge, starting with Amar visual and performing arts. the obvious rather than assume shared Singh’s first-person, subjective knowledge We have been re-enforced in our experience. and extending to the situational truths of tendency toward pluralism in forms of The letters provided a vehicle to evolve Gandhi’s satyagrahas. knowledge and ways of knowing by Max the sort of method and style characteris- I start with a story familiar to anthro- Weber’s embrace of it on the last page of tic of area scholarship. Area scholars are pologists. A Cree hunter is asked by a The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capi- Burkians, not Lockians. They are practi- Canadian court to tell the truth, the whole talism: tioners of specificity and contextualized truth, and nothing but the truth about his It is not our aim to substitute for a one- knowledge, starting with the presump- people’s way life. “I’m not sure I can tell sided materialistic an equally one-sided tion that “my” people are particular. They the truth,” he says, “I can only tell what I spiritualistic causal interpretation of cul-

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