Thomas Trautmann
Biographic Data
| ID | 303686 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Trautmann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Trautmann |
| SIGNATURE | TRAUTMANN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 69 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 237 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1964 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Alexander and the Elephants
Most scholars hold a skeptical view of the war elephant of ancient India. I show that the skepticism of present-day historians derives from ancient Rome, at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire, when the Romans, having defeated the elephant-deploying powers of the Hellenistic period, ended the use of war elephants in its growing empire for all time. Late Roman war elephant skepticism was taken up by Quintus Curtius Rufus, who e…
Bibliotheca Malabarica: Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg’s Tamil Library. Edited and translated by Will Sweetman with R. Ilakkuvan
Bibliotheca Malabarica: Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg’s Tamil Library. Edited and translated by Will Sweetman with R. Ilakkuvan. École française d’Extrême-Orient, Collection Indologie 119. Pondicherry: Institut FrançaiS de Pondichéry and École Française d’ExtrêmE-Orient, 2012. Pp. 153. €17
Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company. By Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher
The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company. By Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher. Royal Asiatic Society Books. London: Routledge, 2012. Pp. xv + 238, 5 plates. $145
A Dharma Reader: Classical Indian Law. Translated and edited by Patrick Olivelle
A Dharma Reader: Classical Indian Law. Translated and edited by Patrick Olivelle. Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought. New York: Columbia UnIversity Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 410. $80
Megasthenes on the Military Livestock of Chandragupta and the Making of the First Indian Empire
Megasthenes was an eyewitness to the reign of Chandragupta Maurya, maker of the first India-wide empire (from ca. 321 BCE). The army with which he made that empire depended largely upon the supply of men, horses, elephants, and oxen, a sector which may be called military livestock. Megasthenes' account of this large sector of government expense and the policies under which it operated gives important testimony about the causes of Chandragupta's s…
Raymond Grew 1930-2020
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The gift in India
This article is a previously unpublished conference talk on the use made by Marcel Mauss, in his essay on the gift, of sources in Sanskrit from ancient India. As Lévi-Strauss derives his theory of marriage as a special case of Mauss' theory of the gift, the Sanskrit sources derive their ideal of gift marriage (the gift of a maiden, by her father, to the groom) as a special case of the concept of religious gifts; but the two theories are opposed, …
Towards a Deep History of Mahouts
This chapter explores the ancient origins of the war elephant in India and its dissemination as a technology based on the union of man and elephant. Considering the westward spread to the Persian and Hellenistic kingdoms, and the later eastward spread to the Indianizing kingdoms of Southeast Asia, it argues that the emergence of the mahout as a professional elephant rider depended on the sponsorship of kings, who also managed reserved forests to …
War elephants
The ideal war elephant was a mature male, with large tusks, in the heightened hormonal state of combativeness called musth, having a driver on his neck bearing the two-pointed hook to restrain him, and warriors on his back. The kings of early civilizations (Egypt, Assyria, Mesopotamia, China, the Indus Civilization) were drawn to elephants in ways that caused their decline. That was reversed by the invention of the war elephant, in late Vedic per…
North India, South India, Sri Lanka
The institution of the war elephant, and the ideal of the fourfold army containing them, spread across North India and was normative by 500 BCE. Soon after it spread to South India and Sri Lanka. The success of the first unifiers of India, the Mauryas, had to do with their access to abundant wild elephants, and their monopoly of elephants, horses and arms. The Mauryas were the main agents of the spread of the institution to the southern regions.
Drawing the balance, looking ahead
Ming period records show the Chinese confronting “bandit” armies in Yunnan using war elephants in the Indian manner, but the Chinese themselves refused to do so. The “land ethic” of India allows for the juxtaposition of cropland, pasture and forest; that of China proper maximizes cropland at the expense of pasture, forest and wild animals including elephants. After the demise of the war elephant there was a two-century reign of the timber elephan…
Structures of use: Caturanga, Vahana, Vyuha
Elephants were fitted into, and altered, existing structures of use. The threefold Indian army (foot soldiers, chariots, cavalry) now acquired an elephant corps and became fourfold (caturaṅga); elephants became the most prestigious form of conveyance (vāhana), reserved for the king; and war elephants took their place in the doctrine of battle arrays (vyūha). The game of chess was a product of this culture.
Southeast Asia
Funan, earliest kingdom to emerge in Southeast Asia, adopted the Indian model of kingship and used war elephants. Subsequent Indianizing kingdoms of the region used war elephants, for the better part of two millennia. Wild elephants were abundant, and instead of importing elephants from India local peoples adopted Indian methods of capture, training and management. Elephants feature prominently in the monuments of Angkor Wat.
The Near East, North Africa, Europe
Kings of Persia imported war elephants and Indian drivers. Alexander the Great acquired Indian elephants and elephant personnel. After his death the Hellenistic kingdoms used war elephants against one another. Seleucids of Syria got elephants from India, while Ptolemies of Egypt trained up African elephants using Indian elephant knowledge. Carthaginians, Romans, Sassanian kings of Persia and Ghaznavid Muslim kings also used war elephants. In all …
The retreat and persistance of elephants
Elephant numbers worldwide are in decline, but in India they are holding steady and even increasing somewhat. China once had wild elephants throughout but now has only a handful, in the region bordering Southeast Asia. India’s relative success has to do with the institution of the war elephant, which gave its kings an interest in protecting wild elephants.
Elephant knowledge
The elephant staff—hunter, trainer, driver, physician—embodied and transmitted the knowledge of elephants and their management. The content of this knowledge can be tracked in an ancient Sanskrit treatise of kingship, and the Persian survey of the kingdom of Akbar, more than a thousand years later (the Arthaśāstra and Ain-i Akbari).
Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History
The House That Morgan Built
L.H. Morgan’s kinship work began and ended with the Iroquois longhouse, and the Iroquois kinship system that it shaped and by which it was shaped. Kinship became a house for anthropology, shaping and being shaped by the emerging discipline. Much of the house that Morgan built for anthropology still stands, including the last book, on houses and house-life, which seems to anticipate the current literature on houses and house-societies
Does India Have History? Does History Have India
It was the unanimous opinion of the early Orientalists of British India that India had no history, at least in the sense of historical writings. Like every consensus, it contained many variations of detail, as we shall see, but as the view of experts it was widely influential for a long time. For example, R. C. Majumdar gave a thoughtful version of this view at the beginning of the multivolumeHistory and Culture of the Indian People(Majumdar 1951…
Interviews mit Kindern
„Das Interview erscheint als einfache Methode, nicht zuletzt aufgrund seiner Nähe zum Alltagsgespräch. Fragen zu stellen liegt nahe und erscheint so leicht. Darin liegt etwas Verführerisches...“ (Friedr
Interviews mit Kindern: Grundlagen, Techniken, Besonderheiten, Beispiele
Interviews Mit Kindern: Grundlagen, Techniken, Besonderheiten, Beispiele
A taxonomy for regulatory uncertainty—application to the European Emission Trading Scheme
Being Editor
Having brought my editorship to an end just before the CSSH fiftieth birthday-having, you might say, just stepped out of the maelstrom-it might be worthwhile to seize the occasion to analyze, in tranquility, what at the time was just too intense, too difficult but also too deeply satisfying an experience to put into words. Without a doubt, being editor of CSSH was the most gratifying job I ever had, but why? How to bottle the maelstrom
Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras
British rule of India brought together two very different traditions of scholarship about language, whose conjuncture led to several intellectual breakthroughs of lasting value. Two of these were especially important: the conceptualization of the Indo-European language family by Sir William Jones at Calcutta in 1786—proposing that Sanskrit is related to Persian and languages of Europe—and the conceptualization of the Dravidian language family of …
Aryans and British India
"Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the …
Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History
Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship
This article examines Lewis Henry Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) as a pioneering work of kinship study. It argues that Morgan's key concepts, such as the classificatory system of kinship, were not simply flawed ethnographic observations, but rather theoretical constructs that reflected his broader evolutionary framework. The article explores how Morgan's ideas about kinship were shaped by his intellectua…
The Revolution in Ethnological Time
The decisive event for the formation of anthropology in the 1860s was not Darwinism but the 'revolution in ethnological time', by which is meant the sudden collapse of the short biblical chronology for human history, and the opening out of an earlier prehistory of indefinite length. The principal effects of the time revolution were: to facilitate the formation of macrohistories that were naturalistic, gradualist and developmental; to remove the c…
In the Beginning Was the Word: Excavating the Relations Between History and Archaeology in South Asia
The study of the historic past, through material evidence and texts, was an integral component of colonial practice in India, and remains a highly visible governmental and public focus in contemporary South Asia. In this paper, we present an historic overview of the development of knowledge and research on ancient India, beginning with the formation of the Asiatic Society in 1784 and proceeding to the creation of the Archaeological Survey of Indi…
The whole history of kinship terminology in three chapters: Before Morgan, Morgan, and after Morgan
The article questions the current consensus that kinship terminologies evolve from something like the Dravidian to something like the English terminology, examining it over three time periods. Before Morgan the study of kinship terminology was embedded within a comparative study of core vocabularies to determine historic relations among nations (e.g. Leibniz). Morgan's breakthrough was to disembed the terms of kinship from the vocabulary list and…
Hullabaloo About Telugu
The Munda of Central India: An Account of Their Social Organization
Does India Have History? Does History Have India
It was the unanimous opinion of the early Orientalists of British India that India had no history, at least in the sense of historical writings. Like every consensus, it contained many variations of detail, as we shall see, but as the view of experts it was widely influential for a long time. For example, R. C. Majumdar gave a thoughtful version of this view at the beginning of the multivolumeHistory and Culture of the Indian People(Majumdar 1951…
A taxonomy for regulatory uncertainty—application to the European Emission Trading Scheme
Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India: A tale of two cities
British India was an especially fruitful site for the development of historical linguistics. Four major, unanticipated discoveries were especially associated with the East India Company: those of Indo-European, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian and the Indo-Aryan nature of Romani. It is argued that they came about in British India because the European tradition of language analysis met and combined with aspects of the highly sophisticated Indian langu…
India and the Study of Kinship Terminologies
L'Inde et l'étude des terminologies de parenté. - L'étude des terminologies de parenté s'est développée au xviiie siècle à partir de l'ethnologie linguistique, laquelle souhaitait découvrir les relations historiques existant entre les nations en étudiant celles entre les langues en se servant de listes de mots du vocabulaire courant comprenant des termes de parenté. Lewis H. Morgan fut le premier à conceptualiser la terminologie de parenté en tan…
Aryans and British India
Dr Johnson and the pandits: Imagining the perfect dictionary in colonial Madras
Aryans and British India
'Aryan,' a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the …
Decoding Dravidian Kinship: Morgan and McIlvaine
Length of Generation and Reign in Ancient India
This article presents a new method of testing hypotheses concerning ancient Indian chronology, namely, by comparing them with a sample of kings of medieval India whose dates are better known. Tables are drawn up showing the durations, to the nearest year, of one to ten successive generations and reigns of the medieval dynasties included in the sample, taking running totals within dynasties for each observation. The tables show only those 10% or s…
Megasthenes on the Military Livestock of Chandragupta and the Making of the First Indian Empire
Megasthenes was an eyewitness to the reign of Chandragupta Maurya, maker of the first India-wide empire (from ca. 321 BCE). The army with which he made that empire depended largely upon the supply of men, horses, elephants, and oxen, a sector which may be called military livestock. Megasthenes' account of this large sector of government expense and the policies under which it operated gives important testimony about the causes of Chandragupta's s…
The gift in India
This article is a previously unpublished conference talk on the use made by Marcel Mauss, in his essay on the gift, of sources in Sanskrit from ancient India. As Lévi-Strauss derives his theory of marriage as a special case of Mauss' theory of the gift, the Sanskrit sources derive their ideal of gift marriage (the gift of a maiden, by her father, to the groom) as a special case of the concept of religious gifts; but the two theories are opposed, …
The House That Morgan Built
L.H. Morgan’s kinship work began and ended with the Iroquois longhouse, and the Iroquois kinship system that it shaped and by which it was shaped. Kinship became a house for anthropology, shaping and being shaped by the emerging discipline. Much of the house that Morgan built for anthropology still stands, including the last book, on houses and house-life, which seems to anticipate the current literature on houses and house-societies
Dravidian Kinship and the Anthropology of Lewis Henry Morgan
This article examines Lewis Henry Morgan's anthropological theories on kinship, particularly his analysis of Dravidian kinship systems. Trautmann argues that Morgan's understanding of Dravidian kinship was flawed due to his reliance on incomplete and sometimes inaccurate data. He further contends that Morgan's evolutionary framework, which posited a progression from classificatory to descriptive kinship systems, was overly simplistic and failed t…
Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture
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Consanguineous Marriage in Pali Literature
Instances of cross-cousin marriage in Pali literature are found only in the post-canonical stratum and are unsupported or in some cases contradicted by non-Pali versions of the same stories. They reflect, therefore, the kinship practices of early Ceylon, not North India. Eighteen cases of cross-cousin marriage among Ceylonese kings are almost equally divided between the patrilateral (father's sister's daughter) and matrilateral (mother's brother'…
A Metrical Original for the Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra
Women in Manu and His Seven Commentators
On the Translation of the Term Varna
The Problem of the Bid'a in the Light of an Arabic Manuscript of the I4th Century
A Metrical Original for the Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra
J. Duncan M. Derrett: Religion, law and the state in India. 615pp. London: Fader and Fader, 1968. 90 s
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Studies in the Society and Administration of Ancient and Medieval India. Vol. I: SocietyStudies in Indian Coins
Studies in the Society and Administration of Ancient and Medieval India. Vol. I: Society. By D. C. Sircar. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1967. ix, 321 pp. Index. Rs. 25.00. - Studies in Indian Coins. By D. C. Sircar. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968. xii, 405 pp. Illustrations, Index. Rs. 60.00. - Volume 29 Issue 1
Length of Generation and Reign in Ancient India
This article presents a new method of testing hypotheses concerning ancient Indian chronology, namely, by comparing them with a sample of kings of medieval India whose dates are better known. Tables are drawn up showing the durations, to the nearest year, of one to ten successive generations and reigns of the medieval dynasties included in the sample, taking running totals within dynasties for each observation. The tables show only those 10% or s…
Licchavi-Dauhitra
The theory that Samudra Gupta inherited the kingdom of his maternal grandfather as well as that of his father is unsupported by the lawbooks, for if he were his maternal grandfather's heir he could also inherit his paternal estate only if his father had no other sons, which we know was not the case. Reference to the mother's patrilineage in this and other cases is made (1) to distinguish one's descent from that of half-brothers, (2) because of th…
Kauṭilya and the Arthaśāstra. A Statistical Investigation of the Authorship and Evolution of the Text
Consanguineous Marriage in Pali Literature
Instances of cross-cousin marriage in Pali literature are found only in the post-canonical stratum and are unsupported or in some cases contradicted by non-Pali versions of the same stories. They reflect, therefore, the kinship practices of early Ceylon, not North India. Eighteen cases of cross-cousin marriage among Ceylonese kings are almost equally divided between the patrilateral (father's sister's daughter) and matrilateral (mother's brother'…
Kinship and History in South Asia: Four Lectures
Kinship and History in South Asia presents four papers given at a small conference of kinship studies scholars, “Kinship and History in South Asia,” at the University of Toronto in 1973. They draw upon one another and show several common concerns, particularly the theoretical importance of Dravidian systems. Yey they remain specialist studies, each within its own raison d’être. Brendra E. F. Beck contributes a study of the “kinship nucleus” in Ta…
Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture
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Dravidian Kinship
Dravidian Kinship
Dravidian Kinship
Decoding Dravidian Kinship: Morgan and McIlvaine
El regalo en la India: Marcel Mauss como indólogo
Traducción del inglés: David N. Lorenzen
Dravidian Kinship and the Anthropology of Lewis Henry Morgan
This article examines Lewis Henry Morgan's anthropological theories on kinship, particularly his analysis of Dravidian kinship systems. Trautmann argues that Morgan's understanding of Dravidian kinship was flawed due to his reliance on incomplete and sometimes inaccurate data. He further contends that Morgan's evolutionary framework, which posited a progression from classificatory to descriptive kinship systems, was overly simplistic and failed t…
Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship
This article examines Lewis Henry Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) as a pioneering work of kinship study. It argues that Morgan's key concepts, such as the classificatory system of kinship, were not simply flawed ethnographic observations, but rather theoretical constructs that reflected his broader evolutionary framework. The article explores how Morgan's ideas about kinship were shaped by his intellectua…
La revolución en el tiempo etnológico
The Revolution in Ethnological Time
The decisive event for the formation of anthropology in the 1860s was not Darwinism but the 'revolution in ethnological time', by which is meant the sudden collapse of the short biblical chronology for human history, and the opening out of an earlier prehistory of indefinite length. The principal effects of the time revolution were: to facilitate the formation of macrohistories that were naturalistic, gradualist and developmental; to remove the c…
The Library of Lewis Henry Morgan and Mary Elizabeth Morgan
Thomas R. Trautmann, Karl Sanford Kabelac, The Library of Lewis Henry Morgan and Mary Elizabeth Morgan, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 84, No. 6/7, The Library of Lewis Henry Morgan (1994), pp. i-xiv+1-336
The Munda of Central India: An Account of Their Social Organization
Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture
Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture
History (50 works) · Ancient history (23 works) · Political science (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Geography (19 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (17 works) · Archaeology (16 works) · Art (16 works) · Law (15 works)