Genuine knowledge of a place requires material grounding and crossing disciplinary boundaries
Evidence
What one finds so liberating in Kosambi is definitely the combination: the solidity of scholarship on the one hand; the absolute determination, on the other, to ground all sorts of texts – whether books or coins or customs or stones – in the material history of our people and in the conflicts that history engendered, beyond all spirituality and all humbug. … And his advice, reflected fully in his scholarship: no usable knowledge of India is possible without actually looking at the people who inhabit this land and then working across the boundaries of the constituted academic disciplines. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 543
Categorization
- APHORISMS: The method—look at the actual people, then work across disciplinary boundaries—reads as durable advice for knowledge work.
- XREF: connects to: Harmony in interpretation requires grounding activity in the site’s own true history — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 478