India: Brief History of a Civilization, Second Edition, provides a brief overview of a very long period, allowing students to acquire a mental map of the entire history of Indian civilization in a short book. Most comprehensive histories devote a few chapters to the early history of India and an increasing number of pages to the more recent period, giving an impression that early history is mere background and that Indian civilization finds its fulfillment in the nation-state. Thomas R. Trautmann believes that the deep past lives on and is a valuable resource for understanding the present day and for creating a viable future. The result is a book that is short enough to read in a few sittings, but comprehensive in coverage--5,000 years of India in brief.

India: Brief History of a Civilization

History

Trautmann, Thomas R.

Asia

Oxford University Press

India: Brief History of a Civilization provides a brief overview of a very long period, allowing students to acquire a mental map of the entire history of Indian civilization in a short book. Most comprehensive histories devote a few chapters to the early history of India and an increasing number of pages to the more recent period, giving an impression that early history is mere background and that Indian civilization finds its fulfillment in the nation-state. Thomas R. Trautmann believes that the deep past lives on and is a valuable resource for understanding the present day and for creating a viable future. The result is a book that is short enough to read in a few sittings, but comprehensive in coverage--5,000 years of India in brief.

Because of their enormous size, elephants have long been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In early civilizations—such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, and China—kings used elephants for royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, or the conspicuous consumption of ivory—all of them tending toward the elephant’s extinction. The kings of India, however, as Thomas R. Trautmann shows in this study, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war. Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the west—where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquity—and Southeast Asia (but not China, significantly), a history that spans 3,000 years and a considerable part of the globe, from Spain to Java. He shows that because elephants eat such massive quantities of food, it was uneconomic to raise them from birth. Rather, in a unique form of domestication, Indian kings captured wild adults and trained them, one by one, through millennia. Kings were thus compelled to protect wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being cut down. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations, Trautmann throws into relief the structure of India’s environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests.

Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History

University of Chicago Press

Ancient Civilizations

TRAUTMANN, T, R,: LEWIS HENRY MORGAN AND THE INVENTION OF KINSHIP, LONDON, 1987, xv 290 p, figuras,Encuadernacion original, Nuevo,

Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship

Americas

Univ. Of California Pr.

Lewis Henry Morgan of Rochester, New York, lawyer and pioneer anthropologist, was the leading American contributor of his generation to the social sciences. Among the classic works whose conjunction in the 1860s gave modern anthropology its shape, Morgan's massive and technical Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family was decisive. Thomas Trautmann offers a new interpretation of the genesis of "kinship," and of the role it played in late nineteenth-century intellectual history.

University of California Press

"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 principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India. His work of reassessing British Orientalism and the Aryan idea will be of great interest to historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics.

Aryans and British India

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 South India by F.W. Ellis at Madras in 1816―the “Dravidian proof,” showing that the languages of South India are related to one another but are not derived from Sanskrit. These concepts are valid still today, centuries later. This book continues the examination Thomas R. Trautmann began in Aryans and British India (1997). While the previous book focused on Calcutta and Jones, the current volume examines these developments from the vantage of Madras, focusing on Ellis, Collector of Madras, and the Indian scholars with whom he worked at the College of Fort St. George, making use of the rich colonial record. Trautmann concludes by showing how elements of the Indian analysis of language have been folded into historical linguistics and continue in the present as unseen but nevertheless living elements of the modern.

Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Dravidian Kinship (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 36)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Cambridge University Press

"Dravidian Kinship analyses the kinship system of South India and Sri Lanka as it has developed over the last two thousand years, combining historical evidence of the past with anthropological studies of the present." "This classic book, reissued after fourteen years, provides the only comprehensive account of the Dravidian system. Professor Trautmann treats the kinship systems of the many local communities of South India and Sri Lanka as so many variants of a single Dravidian pattern, historically related to one another as descendants of a common ancestral system. He devises methods to identify and sift our the effects of outside influence (notably that of the Indo-Aryan kinship systems of North India), and reconstructs, through a comparative study of the variant local systems, the ancestral proto-Dravidian kinship system from with they derive. The book also analyses the relation of the Dravidian system to the culture of kinship norms to be found in the Dharmasastras, and its role in political alliance-building in the dynastic marriages of the Dravidian region."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Dravidian Kinship

Sage Pubns Pvt Ltd

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Trautmann, Thomas R.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Trautmann, Thomas R.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Trautmann, Thomas R.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

India: Brief History of a Civilization

India: Brief History of a Civilization

Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History

Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History

Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship

Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship

Aryans and British India

Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras

Dravidian Kinship (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 36)

Dravidian Kinship