When one first looks at Pandian's "The Remembering Village", it feels almost like a book report. The first sentence is about Louis Dumont, who appears to be the subject of the article. It isn't until the third page (end of the third paragraph) that Pandian reveals his interest in Dumont: to uncover the hidden aspects of the anthropologist's life in the field by visiting his old site. This kind of meta-anthropology is interesting in content, quite a lot is revealed about Dumont and his role in the village in which he stayed, but this could easily have been achieved in different ways. The point of this particular style of writing is also to critique the role of ethnographies in anthropology.
Throughout the article, there is a back and forth between the Dumont's history and Pandian's current experiences. A vignette of Dumont's home in the Kallar village is juxtaposed against Pandian's remarks on logical gaps which Dumont failed to point out such as the spacing between the buildings, and the current (at the time of Pandian's visit) state of the house first mentioned. Similarly, there is an instance when Pandian states that Dumont would carry a hand camera and the older members of the village said to him "I'm there too!"
I think Pandian is drawing out the gaps the reader does not see in an anthropological text. He does this by showing these gaps, literally stating accounts from people about Dumont which were not mentioned in his works, but also by demonstrating, by not elaborating where it ought to be. The crux of his argument is that the people anthropologists study are touched by them long after they are gone and it is important to remember this, but less than half of the article is about these people! This illogical composition, if by mistake, is a happy one in pointing out some finer aspects of ethnography that are often overlooked.
Throughout the article, there is a back and forth between the Dumont's history and Pandian's current experiences. A vignette of Dumont's home in the Kallar village is juxtaposed against Pandian's remarks on logical gaps which Dumont failed to point out such as the spacing between the buildings, and the current (at the time of Pandian's visit) state of the house first mentioned. Similarly, there is an instance when Pandian states that Dumont would carry a hand camera and the older members of the village said to him "I'm there too!"
I think Pandian is drawing out the gaps the reader does not see in an anthropological text. He does this by showing these gaps, literally stating accounts from people about Dumont which were not mentioned in his works, but also by demonstrating, by not elaborating where it ought to be. The crux of his argument is that the people anthropologists study are touched by them long after they are gone and it is important to remember this, but less than half of the article is about these people! This illogical composition, if by mistake, is a happy one in pointing out some finer aspects of ethnography that are often overlooked.
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