It has rightly been said that theory, if not received at the door of an empirical discipline, comes in through the chimney like a ghost and upsets the furniture. But it is no less true that history, if not received at the door of a theoretical discipline dealing with the same set of phenomena, creeps into the cellar like a horde of mice and undermines the groundwork (Panofsky 1955: 22). Introduction Much recent scholarship in folkloristics (e.g., Abrahams 1993; Anttonen 1994; Bendix 1992; Fox 1987; Korom 1992a), anthropology (e.g., Appadurai 1988; Huber 1997; Linke 1990; Strathern 1987) and other related fields (Gill 1987; Pease 1991; Robbins 1990) has drawn attention to the need to embed the scholarly practices of our academic ancestors in particular strands of intertwined ideas in order to understand better the ways that individual theories develop out of concrete intellectual environments. These environments, often generated by the charisma or vision of unusually motivated thinkers, are never static, for they constantly resonate with the current events of the period in question. One must therefore situate such personalities in their broader social, political and ideological contexts in order to move away from the spurious concept of theory from nowhere (cf. Appadurai 1986). Doing so also allows us to unpack the latent agendas of the proponents of theories that no longer capture the minds of contemporary scholars. Uncovering more about why certain researchers conceptualized their subject matter in the way they did provides poignant clues to the past development of academic inquiry and, hopefully, signals directions for future investigation. Dan Ben-Amos had already pointed out more than two decades ago that disciplinary social and historical ...exploration has direct bearing upon the ideas and theories that we formulate (1973:119), and Charles Briggs (1993) has more recently stated that the metadiscursive practices of researchers in the social and human sciences have the power to create chains of authority upon which our theories are then based.2 None of the ideas discussed above are particularly new, since the history of ideas and the sociology of knowledge are, after all, time-honored disciplines (cf. Bidney 1953; Kuhn 1970). But the above lines of reasoning clearly remind us of a continuing need to connect the temporal and spatial links in chains of thought, allowing us to unravel strands of ideas that lead to the construction of particular academic representations of the Other.3 The process of unlinking a chain of authority, however, is not simply a chronological one, for the epistemological premise underlying the necessary methodology for such an exercise rests upon what Michel Foucault (1972) has termed an of knowledge. Arjun Appadurai (1988) characterizes intellectual archaeology as the analysis of genealogies. Genealogies, as he warns us, are selective: ...Every genealogy is a choice among a virtually infinite set of genealogies that make up the problem of influence and source in intellectual history. Every idea ramifies indefinitely backward in time, and at each critical historical juncture, key ideas ramify indefinitely into their own horizontal, contemporary contexts (1988:40). Digging through the multiple striations of a complex line of reasoning must thus move both vertically and horizontally to reveal the many unpredictable connections that occur not only in chronological sequence but also in sometimes punctuated leaps through geographical space. This is especially true in colonial situations where indigenous scholars were being trained in the ethnological theories of the dominant culture. My purpose in this essay is to unravel one demarcated genealogy in the history of folklore studies in India. The problem, however, is that the Other being constructed in this instance is not an individual, group or community; rather, I am interested in how a particular local deity in West Bengal, India, was constructed by a group of scholars working in a specific cultural climate of sociopolitical oppression during a critical period of time in colonial Bengal. …