Telling Otherwise: A Historical Anthropology of Tank Irrigation Technology in South India

摘要

Shah offers a historical anthropology of tank (small irrigation reservoirs behind earthen embankments) irrigation technology in South India. She argues that precolonial scientific and technological knowledge in India cannot be reduced to simplistic contextual comparisons with European, especially British colonial, knowledge. Rather, traditional folk literature, temple inscriptions, and other textual evidence illuminate past social activities, including her focus, the construction of Indian tanks, beginning in the first centuries. Instead of modern planning reports, policy statements, and blueprints, she relies on oral tradition, songs, and written folktales replete with human sacrifice, gods, and various monsters.