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Rawat Publications When a Great Tradition Modernizes An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization by Singer Milton
The present book is indispensable not only to anyone who wishes to understand the forces operating beneath the surface in modern India but also to all students of social and cultural change and, in particular, of the modernization process in developing countries.—M.N. SRINIVASA passage to more than India, this major work by Milton Singer records the refinement, through three trips to India and almost two decades of research, of a theory of cultural change. By alternating chapters of field reports with chapters of theoretical analysis, Singer illuminates the central problem of the book—how cultural change is shaped by the interaction between India’s “Great Tradition” of Sanskritic Hinduism and the life of a modern city, Madras.The method of discovery has been the anthropological one, getting to know another culture in its own terms. The three field trips reported in this volume are explorations of an extended method for a social anthropological study of civilizations. They should be read in this spirit and in the context of the more general issues discussed in the theoretical papers. A roughly chronological sequence is retained in the volume as a whole to make it possible for the reader to retrace the order of discovery.Singer’s incisive work focuses on one “Great Tradition” in a single city at the present time, but his remarkable insights into the interplay between tradition and modernity cannot but enrich our understanding of cultural and social change in other civilizations, both past and present.