R. Thomas Rosin
Anthropological Research and
Writings
Much of my work has been an effort to understand
agency as it unfolds in human affairs:
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To discover the locus of agency as it
occurs (whether at the level of individual, couple, joint
family, marriage network, four-family partnership, or the
self-organizing synergy found among those monitoring and
anticipating one anothers' attitudes and actions in traffic
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To reveal agency as a process involving
cognitions, computations, persuasive representation,
strategic thinking, and/or values that express ideas through
human action;
To grasp the opportunities for and
constrains upon agency;
And to assess the aggregate outcome of
agency in generating social order and cultural pattern.
In understanding agency and aggregate
outcome in social or cultural forms, I have conjoined
ethnographic inquiry -- into local cognitions, computations,
decision making, and strategies of action -- with the use of
formal models and mathematics --whether in a manner
investigative, analytic or metaphoric. I have studied such
aggregate outcomes as architectural form, settlement
pattern, land tenure reform, cultural landscape, and the
flow of roadside traffic.
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The Ethnography
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Searching for sites of decision-making
My earliest research sought to articulate
a generative model, through which I might discover the locus
for choice-making and agency at various levels of social
organization, while documenting the aggregate outcome from
choice and action in terms of adaptive pattern and polity
for the community of Gangwa in central Rajasthan, India. In
this manner of studying a broad range of castes, classes,
and strategic actions, I could explain differential success
and failure, resulting in a reshaping of the agrarian and
social landscape.
- Land Reform and Agrarian Change;
Study of a Marwar Village from Raj to
Swaraj. Pp. 270. (Jaipur:
Rawat Press.) [Available through South Asia Book, c/o
Gerald Barrier, University of Missouri, P.O.Box 502,
Columbia, Missouri 65205] 1987.
- Peasant Adaptation as Process in Land
Reform: A Case Study. American Studies in the
Anthropology of
India, edited by Sylvia Vatuk,
pp. 460-495. (New Delhi: Manohar & American Institute
of Indian Studies.) 1978
- Land Reform in Rajasthan.
Current
Anthropology 22 (1). February
1981.
Searching for sites of actual
decision-making about marriage and family structure, in "Set
Marriages and the Joint Family in Rajasthan" (1995), I have
re-examined village census data gathered in 1963-1965 to
discover demographic junctures for selection among
alternatives. To choose jointness, in the arrangement of
marriage or in the structure of household, does require the
requisite sets of siblings.
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- Set Marriages and the Joint Family in
Rajasthan, India: An Ethnologic Construction from Census Data, in
Folk, Faith, &
Feudalism, edited by N. K. Singhi and
Rajendra Joshi, pp. 205-240. (Jaipur, India: Institute of
Rajasthan Studies, Rawat Press.) 1995.
Accordingly, my tally of real choices discovers
interesting regularities not within the community at large, but
limited to specific castes, uncovering distinct differences in values
and decision making processes.. Whether such choices might contribute
to, or cause, such outcomes as increased family solidarity, corporate
effectiveness, or reproduction or economic success would require
another census, now fifty years later, as well as additional kinds of
economic, reproductive, and behavioral data.
On entrepreneurial choice and family history:
The contrastive impact of industrial and agrarian activities upon
local economy and polity.
In a region noted for a rapid reform of the
countryside during the 40 years since the Independence of India, I
trace briefly the entrepreneurial successes of a laborer who became a
contractor in the marble quarries of Makrana. I recalling in a
literary piece, "Eulogy for Bolu" (1985), the character and dramatic
village persona of his father who helped launch this son on his
independent career. Placing his career within the context of labor
and capital flowing between industrial town and this neighboring
village, I assess in "Quarry and Field" (1987) the relative impact of
industrial activity as opposed to agrarian political mobilization
upon village social organization and ideal of community.
- From the Mines of Makrana Came the Marble for
the Taj Mahal. Bulletin of Concerned
Asian Scholars 17(1): 32-41.
1984
- Eulogy for Bolu Boari. New Letters 52 (1): 128-132.
(Fall) 1985.
- Quarry and Field: Sources of Continuity and
Change in a Rajasthani Village. Dimensions of Social Life: Essays in Honor of David
Mandelbaum, edited by Paul Hockings.
(Berlin: Mouton de Gruyther.) 1987
On the ethnographic study of computative skills
among farmers practicing groundwater irrigation
For farmers working as partners in groundwater
development and irrigation in the semi-arid zone of central
Rajasthan, India, the achievement of equity in their working
relationships depended upon means to measure and assess fair share.
How might they assess fairness in sharing labor,
resources, other costs, and the gains of harvest? Might there be a
"folk mathematics" awaiting ethnographic documentation and
analysis?
Re-adapting H. A. Thurston's The Number System
(1956), "Gold Medallions" provides a method to elicit and an analytic
approach to describe the computational skills grounded in the every
day life of a Rajasthani rural community, with it's tradition of
four-family partnerships in groundwater irrigated farming. Selected
for reissue in the commemorative Anniversary Issue of Anthropology & Educational Quarterly released by Council of Anthropology and Education, the
article analyzes a natural number system on the base four.
- Gold Medallions: The Arithmetic Calculations
of an Illiterate. Anthropology &
Education Quarterly Anniversary Issue
15 (1): 38-50. Spring 1984.)
How do farmer's measure the promise of the
aquifer, anticipate their costs in extracting and the time required
in recharging? In planning a season of crops how may they anticipate
the recharge that will afford them another season of multiple
irrigations? How may they check their estimates of prior years
against their experience of bringing successfully to harvest the
acreage they had chosen to seed and irrigate?
"Locality and Frontier" (1993) reviews the
traditional instruments, organization and measurements for
groundwater extraction across the Aravallian sweep of central
Rajasthan; while "The Tradition of Groundwater Irrigation" (1993).
which focuses on the village Gangwa, documents how successive
generations of villagers have reshaped the natural environment to
harvest rainwater and recharge the aquifer.
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- Locality and Frontier: Securing
Livelihood in the Aravalli Zone of Central Rajasthan.
The Idea of
Rajasthan;
- Explorations in Regional
Identity, edited by Schomer,
K., Rudolph, L., Erdman, J., and Lodrick, D. , Vol. II,
pp. 30-64. (New Delhi: Manohar and American Institute of
Indian Studies.) 1993.
- The Tradition of Groundwater
Irrigation in Northwestern India. Human Ecology
21(1):51-86. 1993.
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An Ethnographer's Perspective on the Groundwater
Crisis: A Longitudinal Case Study of a Rajasthani Village.
Groundwater Management: The supply
dominated focus of traditional, NGO and Government
Efforts, edited by Marcus Moench. pp.
5-41. Ahmedabad: VIKSAT (Vikram Sarabhai Centre for Development
Interaction); Oakland, CA :Pacific Institute; San Francisco: Natural
Heritage Foundation.) April 1995. "An
ethnographer's perspective" (1995) views the dynamic between supply
and demand that determines balance in sustaining the water table by
examining local knowledge and practices for both enhancing water
supply and limiting demand.
Toward Constructing Formal Models
Self organization in groundwater
management:
Monitoring and measuring, assessing and
predicting, are central to successful farming. Such cogitations,
however, include measuring and anticipating, as well, the actions of
others with whom they share a common aquifer.
Over successive seasons farmers have observed past
plans and outcomes, observed and anticipated the actions of their
neighbors, and planned the next season accordingly. Might we not see
elements of self organization in achieving optimal conditions for
producing crops while maintaining the water balance? "Practitioners
and Experts" (1997), prepared for the Ahmedabad conference, works up
a model to encourage computer simulation of this process. (See
Attached File.)
- Practitioner and Expert in Dialogue:
Constructing Dynamic Institutions for Groundwater Management,
submitted to the International Conference on Creativity and
Innovation at Grassroots (ICCIG). Indian Institute of Management,
Ahmedabad, India, January 11-14, 1997.
"Practitioner and Expert in Dialogue" (1996) is a
call to join local farmers with hydrologists to test out the local
traditions of water computation and management, in a manner that
would introduce another level of feedback, analysis, and reflection
to lift local traditions into the modern world of scientific
management.
- Practitioner and Expert in Dialogue: A key to
resource conservation. Cultural Survival
Quarterly 20 (2):14-17. Spring
1996.
Built form of neighborhood and household as
aggregate outcome:
Choice, action, and aggregate outcomes may be
studied in the context of settlement pattern and architecture, where
outcomes are directly observable through long term research
documented in the materiality of built form.
In several case studies I have argued that
variations and stages in social form (whether nuclear or joint
family, lineal expansion or segmentation) may be reflected in the
built form of dwellings, neighborhoods, and suburbs. (See Rosin
1997:77-8). Some of these studies have involve recurrent observations
over a thirty-four year period.
- From Garden Surburb to Olde City Ward; A
Longitudinal Study of Social Process and Incremental Architecture
in Jaipur, India, The Journal of
Material Culture Vol. 6, No. 2, pp.
165-192. 2001.
- The Adaptation of Architecture and Settlement
Patterns to the Developmental Cycle of Family and Lineage.
Family, Gender and the Ideologies of
Space Interpretation. (Traditional
Dwellings and Settlements Working Papers Series 21 International
Association for the Study of Traditional Environments.)
1991.
- Family Type and Cycle. Rajasthani Jhoompa. Two
entries in: The Encyclopedia of
Vernacular Architecture in the World,
edited by Paul Oliver. (Cambridge University Press.) 1997
The recycling of waste and the circulation of
traffic as subjects for understanding folk ecologies linking nature
and culture:
Recent Book Reviews
- Review of Sharing
Water: Irrigation and Water Management in the Hindukush &endash;
Karakoram &endash; Himalaya, edited by
Hermann Kreutzmann. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Xxii,
283 pp. Journal of Asian
Studies, Vol. 61(2): 753-5. 2002.
- Review of
Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern
India, by Akhil Gupta (N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1998), Journal of
Asian Studies, Vol. 58 (3): 865-6.
(August) 1999.
- Review of "If the
Rain Doesn't Come"--An Anthropological Study of Drought and Human
Ecology in Western Rajasthan, by R. J.
Fisher. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute (JRAI):
(Fall) 1998.
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