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COLONIAL ETHNOGRAPHY ON INDIA'S NORTH-WEST FRONTIER, 1850–1910*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2016

ZAK LEONARD
ZAK LEONARD*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
*
Department of History, University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago IL 60637, USALeonardzt@gmail.com
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Abstract

Seeking to challenge the totalizing theory of an ‘ethnographic state’, this article examines a mid-nineteenth-century paradigm shift that impacted the colonial study of borderland populations along India's North-West Frontier. While the establishment of metropolitan ethnographic societies in the 1870s facilitated the rise of socio-cultural evolutionism, colonial agents also utilized folklore and proverb studies to represent the borderland societies as dynamic cultural entities reactive to British encroachment. Four case-studies, moreover, demonstrate that a variety of motivations compelled colonial agents to produce ethnographic material. These factors included personal scholarly ambition, political activism, and a commitment to transregional ‘scientific’ data collection projects. This study complicates the relationship between knowledge production and state power by reasserting the significance of personality as an operative force in the formation of colonial discourse.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 175 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Deborah Cohen, and the participants of the Newberry Seminar in British History for their constructive feedback. Additional thanks are due to Kyle Gardner and Gautham Reddy for their input on earlier drafts, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

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82 Ibid., p. 323.

83 Ibid., p. 36.

84 Ibid., p. 279.

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