Remembering Professor McKim Marriott

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Professor Emeritus McKim Marriott, who died July 3, 2024, at the age of 100. Professor Marriott was a leading scholar of South Asia who revolutionized the study of caste. 

Growing up in St. Louis, Missouri in a family of academics, McKim Marriott went to Harvard University in 1941 at the age of 17 with the intention to study anthropology. There he studied anthropology with Clyde Kluckhohn, as well as the Japanese language. Having volunteered for the war effort at age 20, and with knowledge of Japanese, Marriott was sent to India, where he worked to translate Japanese radio transmissions at night while exploring the villages nearby Delhi during the day. After returning to the United States, Marriott began his graduate studies at the University of Chicago in the Department of Anthropology, with a regional focus on India inspired by his time spent there during the war. Conducting eighteen months of dissertation fieldwork from 1950–1952 in Uttar Pradesh on caste in post-Independence village India, this work synthesized the community studies approach of his supervisor, Lloyd Warner, with Robert Redfield and Milton Singer’s comparative project on the “great” and “little traditions.” Professor Marriott received his PhD in 1955, continuing on as faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University until his retirement in 1998.

In his career at the University of Chicago Marriott was a beloved advisor and accomplished teacher, as well as a field-setting scholar of South Asia. Marriott was perhaps best known for his paradigm founding edited volume, Village India: Studies in the Little Community (1955, University of Chicago Press) and his unique approach to caste Hinduism in India, which refused structuralist models of caste in favor of transactional, ethnosociological approaches which centered indigenous philosophical systems in the explanation of social facts. Along with Milton Singer, his student Ralph Nicholas, and Bernard Cohn, Professor Marriott made the Department of Anthropology, and the University of Chicago more widely (with A. K. Ramanujan, Ronald Inden, and others), the pre-eminent center for the study of South Asia, training generations of scholars working at the vanguard of South Asian anthropology.

One of the trademark lessons of his scholarship and teaching was to take serious cultural difference and pluralism, to center the cultural logics of a social group as the basis for its study, emphasizing, in particular, that the study of Indian thought could not be studied with non-Indian categories. As famously experienced by his students, he put his interest in Hindu philosophy into Samsara, a cube-based boardgame he invented and played with colleagues and students. Fondly remembered as an energetic, spritely presence – leaping up the steps of Haskell Hall, Professor Marriott was a dedicated member of our department and University and will be fondly remembered and missed by his colleagues and students.

Announcements on the service and University memorial will be forthcoming.