Prof. Emeritus McKim Marriott, a leading University of Chicago anthropologist whose ethnographic research in India revolutionized the study of the caste system, died July 3. He was 100.
Marriott spent more than four decades of his academic career at UChicago, where his scholarship pushed the boundaries of South Asian anthropology, and his teaching and mentoring inspired generations of students.
Marriott joined the UChicago faculty shortly after receiving his Ph.D. in 1955. That year, he published his most well-known work, Village India: Studies in the Little Community—an edited volume of anthropological studies conducted in villages throughout India. Among the studies included Marriott’s own research in rural northern India, which examined caste in the wake of Indian independence from British colonial rule. His approach, considered radical for Western analysis at the time, centered Indian over non-Indian ways of thinking in studying kinship and caste.
“My idea was holistic research,” Marriott said in a 2008 interview about his fieldwork. “I asked people to describe each other as I was interested in the terms they used. I generally asked open-ended questions.”
His work also refined the concepts of “great” and “little traditions”—a framework first developed by UChicago Profs. Robert Redfield and Milton Singer. Marriott maintained that there were constant interactions between “great” traditions, knowledge and values constructed by the elite and ruling classes; and “little” traditions, the social norms and customs of everyday people.
Over the years, many of his colleagues and students played Samsara, a cube-based boardgame invented by Marriott inspired by his interest in Hindu philosophy and lifelong love of drawing.
In honor of his 90th birthday celebration, colleague and friend Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the History of Religions at UChicago, spoke on Marriott’s lasting legacy: “Nothing that any of us thought or wrote was untouched by Kim’s ideas.”
Caste and kinship
Marriott was born on Feb 1, 1924 in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Williams McKim Marriott, was a renowned Professor of Pediatrics and Dean of the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. His mother, Elizabeth D. Robinson Marriott, was a homemaker. As a teenager, he enjoyed biking through rural parts of the country and dreamed of traveling to Europe and Asia.
In 1941, only a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Marriott began his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, intending to study with anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn. Then 17, he was ineligible for the draft, but was encouraged to study something “useful” in light of the war. He began studying several languages including German, Japanese and Chinese.
At 20, Marriott volunteered for the war effort and was sent to India where, at night, he translated Japanese radio transmissions. During the day, he explored New Delhi on bike, sketching the people and places he observed.
“I could see mud walls with villages behind them and, as a would-be anthropologist, was very curious about what was going on there,” said Marriott in 2008. “[I] realized I had to learn a lot more and resolved to try and come back.”
After the war, Marriott began his graduate studies at the University of Chicago in the Department of Anthropology with a focus on India. From 1950-1952, he conducted 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India, intending to study caste in the wake of the recently ratified Indian Constitution.
Marriott visited over 75 rural villages in his jeep, collecting census data and genealogies. For over a year, he lived in the village of Kishan Garhi, whose inhabitants represented over 20 different castes, interviewing and getting to know each family.
“One of the amazing things that I saw right away was that people from different castes were friends, whereas according to the literature they never talked to each other,” he said.
Over the course of his career, Marriott published many papers on Hinduism, social structures and psychologies in India, Japan and other countries—all the while advocating the importance of cultural difference. Later, he experimented with 3D modeling the relationships and structures he studied. Marriott was a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology until his retirement in 1998.
During Marriott’s 90th birthday celebration, Richard Shweder, the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development at UChicago, remarked: “Kim Marriott at age 49 (when I first met him) and at 90 (when we were all privileged to honor him) walks the walk and exemplifies the spirit of free thinking and an undaunted life of the mind at the University of Chicago.”
Training the next generations
For over four decades, Marriott trained generations of ethnographers who would go on to become influential scholars of South Asia. Former students describe Marriott as a supportive advisor who would continually challenge his students and ask provoking questions.
Ralph Nicholas, the William Rainey Harper Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at UChicago, was first inspired to attend UChicago because of Marriott’s groundbreaking scholarship on India. He fondly recalled the fieldwork stories Marriott would relay in class. “He had a very wry sense of humor,” said Nicholas, PhD’62. “He was very funny, but you had to realize that he was being funny.”
For many years, Marriott also taught and helped shape “Self, Culture and Society,” a renowned social science sequence in UChicago’s Core curriculum. Nicholas reminisced about the way Marriott’s eyes would scan the classroom, peering owlishly behind his characteristic round glasses, after posing a question about Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
“He wanted you to discuss. He wanted to hear what you understood from what you’d read,” Nicholas said. “That was his way of being provocative, and it was very successful.”
Marriot was known for his love of drawing, theater, music, and biking around Hyde Park in his yellow googles.
He was preceded in death by his first wife Jacqueline Fay. He is survived by his wife Barbara Marriott; his children from his first marriage: Diana, Robin, Lucretia and Lisa; his stepchildren: David, Therese, George and Mary; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Announcements on the service and University memorial will be forthcoming.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
