Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A note on spelling and vocabulary
- 1 In Search of India: the empire of Vijayanagara through European eyes
- 2 Marco Polo's India and the Latin Christian tradition
- 3 Establishing lay science: the merchant and the humanist
- 4 Ludovico de Varthema: the curious traveller at the time of Vasco da Gama and Columbus
- 5 The Portuguese and Vijayanagara: politics, religion and classication
- 6 The practice of ethnography: Indian customs and castes
- 7 The social and political order: Vijayanagara decoded
- 8 The historical dimension: from native traditions to European orientalism
- 9 The missionary discovery of South Indian religion: opening the doors of idolatry
- 10 From humanism to scepticism: the independent traveller in the seventeenth century
- Conclusion: Before Orientalism
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
- Past and Present Publications
6 - The practice of ethnography: Indian customs and castes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A note on spelling and vocabulary
- 1 In Search of India: the empire of Vijayanagara through European eyes
- 2 Marco Polo's India and the Latin Christian tradition
- 3 Establishing lay science: the merchant and the humanist
- 4 Ludovico de Varthema: the curious traveller at the time of Vasco da Gama and Columbus
- 5 The Portuguese and Vijayanagara: politics, religion and classication
- 6 The practice of ethnography: Indian customs and castes
- 7 The social and political order: Vijayanagara decoded
- 8 The historical dimension: from native traditions to European orientalism
- 9 The missionary discovery of South Indian religion: opening the doors of idolatry
- 10 From humanism to scepticism: the independent traveller in the seventeenth century
- Conclusion: Before Orientalism
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
- Past and Present Publications
Summary
THE BIRTH OF A COLONIAL ETHNOGRAPHY
The Portuguese presence in Asia after 1499 entailed an important leap both in the amount of information regarding oriental societies which was available, and in the variety of generic forms it took. By virtue of the works written in the early decades of European activity in India, and notwithstanding the fact that the majority were only published years later or remained in manuscript form, South India, and in particular the Malabar coast, was to become one of the better mapped areas of the Renaissance world. This is why, despite its increasingly limited political importance, `Calicut’ still figured prominently in late Renaissance cosmographies such as Giovanni Botero's Relationi universali, alongside China, Persia, Turkey or the `Great Mogor’ of India. Perhaps more importantly, the early descriptions of South India set standards of accuracy and comprehensiveness which remained valid for much of the ethnography of the early modern period. Much more clearly than in the relatively hazy reports of Marco Polo, it is in the narratives of Varthema, Barbosa, Pires, Paes and Nunes that one finds the obvious precedents of such `modern’ ethnographical treatises as Abbeâ Dubois' classic Character, manners and customs of the people of India and of their institutions religious and civil of 1806.
Dubois' treatise, although originally written in French from Jesuit materials, accompanied the consolidation of the British empire in India, and its impact can best be understood as part of a colonial context.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Travel and Ethnology in the RenaissanceSouth India through European Eyes, 1250–1625, pp. 201 - 222Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000