Tradition in fragments: Inherited forms and fractures in the ethics of south India

“Tradition” is a vital concept for anthropology, framing cultural and ethical life in the present as a field of inherited possibilities. The work of Alasdair MacIntyre yields useful means for understanding the concept, but certain of his postulates concerning the necessary coherence of moral traditions may be queried and loosened. I explicate this argument with evidence drawn from a fragmentary tradition of moral virtue in south India, one that persists through scattered forms of moral argumentation, rival narratives and images of a moral selfhood, and diverse domains of ethical practice through which such arguments and narratives find articulation. [tradition, ethics, selfhood, fragment, narrative, practice, India] T he concept of “tradition” suggests that cultural life in the present begins with some kind of inheritance from the past. Persistent attention to modern experience as a condition of rupture and breakage, however, has made such inheritance difficult to think. Tradition itself has been widely taken as a residuum of modernity, often appearing as little more than an ironic “invention” (Hobsbawm 1983) of the past for deliberate ends. Arguments to this effect, although instructive, risk obscuring the specific ways in which discourses, precepts, and practices of the past continue to shape the actuality and eventuality of the present and future. This subject is of particular concern for an anthropology of ethics: an engagement, that is, with the myriad ways in which people work on themselves and others as moral beings. The work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1984, 1988, 1990) has yielded anthropology a crucial resource for grappling with the moral efficacy of tradition, and, I argue in this article, his work is also useful for a revitalized anthropology of tradition. I also argue, however, that certain postulates in MacIntyre’s work concerning the necessary coherence of a vital moral tradition—the unity of its canonical foundations, of its narratives of selfhood, and of its collective practices—ought to be loosened for a fuller realization of this possibility. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from south India, I suggest that far more fragmentary forms of the past and its inheritance may nevertheless serve as effective orientations for an ethical life in the present. Consider, for example, the following instance. Early one evening in 2002 in a village of the Cumbum Valley of Tamil Nadu, I sat with elderly Karupayi, listening as she related a dream she had had over 30 years earlier. The millet fields that she and her husband had been guarding that year were wilting, she told me, as it had not rained in two months. Worried, she lay down to sleep only to dream of two gods sitting side by side on a rope cot. They had offered to grant her any boon of her choice. Landless and poor, she nonetheless asked for nothing more from AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 466–480, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C © 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00048.x Tradition in fragments American Ethnologist them than rain. The deities sympathized with her plight: “The poor thing,” they said. “One in a hundred, she is asking for rain on behalf of everyone. Let all receive the rain that falls for just one good person.” She awoke shortly thereafter, she told me, and the rain came down as promised, hard like stones and unhusked grain. The rain that Karupayi described was showered on behalf of one virtuous individual, yet it also seeped outward to grace those who deserved it much less. I asked her to explain why the less deserving should be rewarded along with the deserving. Calling on her experience as a cultivator, she made a second analogy to better clarify the gift: “We plant paddy, and grass grows among it,” she said. “As the paddy grows, so does the grass. Just like that, rain that falls for good people falls for everyone.” Water for paddy, rain for all: Both of these images supported an ethical practice of sympathetic giving. But the coincidence of these two aqueous figures, I later learned, was something more than an accident of speech. While Karupayi and I sat speaking on her tattered cot, two of her grandchildren clamored and chattered to each other on the floor beside our feet. She told them to be quiet and not to interrupt, and I paid little attention to their young voices. It was only the next year, in California, when I began to transcribe my audio recording of Karupayi’s dream, that I heard for the first time the faint traces of what these two small children were repeating back and forth to each other as we spoke. Much more than juvenile prattle, they spoke lines of strangely formal and archaic Tamil verse: Nelluk kiraittanı̄r vāykkāl valiyōt . ip pullukkum āṅkē pociyumām tollulakil nallā roruvar ul .arēl avarporut . ellārkkum peyyum malai Water drawn for the paddy will run along the channel to soak too the grassy weed— in this old world it rains for everyone on account of one good person. Listening through my headphones, I felt a shiver of wonder. This was the very verse from Mūturai, a collection of 30 moral maxims attributed to the 12th-century Tamil poetess Auvaiyar, that Karupayi herself seemed to have echoed, paddy, weed, rain, and all (Rajagopalan 1998). The children would, no doubt, have memorized these lines in the nearby government primary school, where the official Tamil Nadu state curriculum introduces such moral works to children as early as the first grade. But Karupayi herself was an unlettered daily wage laborer who had hardly attended school and who did not identify her words with Auvaiyar, speaking, instead, from her experience as a cultivator, mother, and devotee. The gulf in their ages and the contrasting forms of their utterances suggested, too, that neither she nor the children—perhaps no older than four or five—had taught the verse to the other. How, then, was I to account for this uncanny resemblance between the didactic lines recited by these children and the expository language of their grandmother? This incident yields a glimpse of a moral tradition in south India that is constituted through processes of both continuity and fragmentation. Certain unmistakable elements of continuity and coherence drew Karupayi and her grandchildren together: the natural exemplars of sympathy as they returned to the present from the past, the agrarian and devotional practices that rendered these images both intelligible and persuasive as guides to everyday conduct, and the unity of a good life conceived and exercised in relation to them. But certain undeniable breaks or ruptures also challenged the assumption that these moral discourses and practices could be sustained by a singular cultural whole: gaps between spoken word and literary referent as embodiments of moral discourse, between official pedagogy and popular knowledge and practice as arenas of transmission, and between the moral qualities of “one good person” and a prevailing social indifference inviting drought and desiccation. Across these bridges and between these gaps lay the contours of a moral tradition in fragments: a tradition of virtue that had maintained both intelligibility and vitality despite its dispersion across multiple domains of pedagogy, practice, and subjectivity. In this article, I seek to outline the fragmentary quality of moral tradition in contemporary south India—the impossibility of its assimilation into a coherent whole—but also the ethical life that it nonetheless enables. In what follows, therefore, dispersed fragments of discourse and practice do not testify to the failure, decay, or death of a vital tradition. Rather, they may be understood as the very form in which the moral resources of the past survive and work as spurs to ethical conduct in the present. In the following pages, I present three arguments concerning the character of moral tradition in rural south India, drawing from but also critically inflecting the work of MacIntyre on the subject of tradition and the necessary forms of its coherence. First, I argue that discourses and practices of virtue are brought forward into the present as a series of fragmentary and often anonymous echoes from the past, easily unmoored from the canonical body of literary verse from which they borrow authority. Second, I suggest that the “topography” of the moral self and its virtues is fragmented in this case across a plurality of narrative forms that endow their subjects with diverse means of engaging themselves critically and that challenge both the possibility and the desirability of a narrative unity of selfhood. Third, I track the dispersion of one mode of virtuous conduct across scattered domains of practical life, arguing that its recurrence, too, may be taken as a form of fragmentation intrinsic to the articulation of moral tradition in south India. I rely throughout on ethnographic evidence drawn from the Cumbum Valley, a fertile agrarian region located in the southwestern