Grain of Sand Award Winner 2009: Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph

Winner: Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (University of Chicago)

We are honored that Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph have accepted the Grain of Sand award for 2010, the first one to be given. In the view of members of the award committee, they embody the attributes described above both personally and in terms of their work. Emeriti at the University of Chicago, they began their political science careers as graduate students at Harvard. Susanne is a past president of APSA (2003–2004), as well as of the Association of Asian Studies. Their shared interest in comparative politics led them to fieldwork in India, an engagement that has continued over 40 years. Among their many publications, solo and joint, are several that engage themes close to the heart of this Conference Group.

But more than these, it was a passage in their co-authored “Writing India: A career overview” (India Review vol. 7, no. 4: 266–94), which I was recently rereading, that caught my eye as symbolic of the contributions Lloyd and Susanne have made to “the interpretive.” They reflect there at one point on a comment of Vicky Hattam’s deploring the “‘deep and enduring’ split between theory and empirical research in political science” (270), noting that that split left “‘no space for the kind of work I aspire to’” (271). They experienced the same split, they write,

but not the disempowerment she experienced. Our teachers and, subsequently, colleagues at Harvard . . . used theory to frame and analyze historical and empirical questions. We learned too . . . that theory, social and psychological as well as political, helped to identify and answer questions. . . . At the University of Chicago, theory mattered. . . . Like M. Jourdain in Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme who was surprised to learn that he was speaking prose, we were surprised to find that we were speaking theory. (271)

It is this eclecticism—this willingness to draw on research-relevant theoretical ideas from whatever discipline and to bring those theories to bear on “the political” in their empirical material—that we applaud in recognizing Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph with this award: they have seen political worlds in grains of sand and, moreover, have held these up for scrutiny in ways that have enabled all of us to see how it is our touch, our gaze, our narrative, that creates both grain and sand in what we study.