[Vision2020] Citing Primary Sources via Secondary Sources

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Greetings:

I've not followed the exchange between Andreas and Jeff in complete detail, but as a professional academic myself, I would advise Jeff to back off and even apologize if it is in his heart.

I'm preparing for a keynote address that I will give on Gandhi's birthday on Oct. 2 at San Diego State University.  When I first started doing my Gandhi research in the early 1990s, it was very difficult to get the primary sources, even through interlibrary loan.  Until I went on sabbatical to India, I relied on secondary sources, especially very fine anthologies of passages arranged by subject and fully documented.

When I finally got to India, I was able to sit down and check out references and read for context in Gandhi's Collected Works (100 volumes!) and the journals Young India and Harijan.  Very few Gandhi scholars read every page of these huge volumes. That is why we have bibliographers.

Gandhi kept meticulous records of everything that happened in his ashrams, and most of that does not make for very edifying reading.  The Collected Works have a very good index, so that was very handy to find the passages that I needed for a particular topic.

As soon as finish this post, I will go downstairs to my reading couch and re-read the fabulous anthologies that take me right to the passages that I want to review, and perhaps I'll find some new good ones.  The Collected Works are now on line, but they are even more clumsy to use than the actual books themselves.  For crucial passages I will double check the original references again on line.

I believe this is what Andreas did, and if I'm right, then I'm just as guilty of plagiarism as he is.  I wouldn't be invited to San Diego if that is what my colleagues think I did.

Nick Gier