[…] Eu égard au discours académique de l’histoire – l’« histoire » en tant que discours produit dans le site institutionnel qu’est l’université –, l’« Europe » demeure le sujet théorique souverain de toutes les histoires, y compris de celles que nous appelons « indienne », « chinoise », « kényane », et ainsi de suite. De façon très étrange, toutes ces histoires ont tendance à devenir des variantes d’un récit maître que l’on pourrait appeler « l’histoire de l’Europe ». En ce sens, l’histoire « indienne » se trouve elle-même dans une position de subalternité ; c’est au nom de cette histoire seulement que l’on peut articuler des positions subjectives subalternes. […]…
Let me make it clear that the raging Medusa of cultural relativism is not rearing her ugly head in my discussion at this point. To allow for plurality, signified by the plurality of gods, is to think in terms of singularities. To think in terms of singularities, however—and this I must make clear since so many scholars these days are prone to see parochialism, essentialism, or cultural relativism in every claim of non-Western difference—is not to make a claim against the demonstrable and documentable permeability of cultures and languages. It is, in fact, to appeal to models of cross-cultural and…
Consider the following description from the 1930s of a particular festival (still quite common in India) that entails the worshiping of machinery by workers : “In some of the jute mills near Calcutta the mechanics often sacrifice goats at this time [autumn]. A separate alter is erected by the mechanics… . Various tools and other emblems are placed upon it… . Incense is burnt… . Towards evening a male goat is thoroughly washed … and prepared for a … final sacrifice… . The animal is decapitated at one stroke … [and] the head is deposited in the … sacred Ganges.” This…
The prefix pre in “precapital,” it could be said similarly, is not a reference to what is simply chronologically prior on an ordinal, homogeneous scale of time. “Precapitalist” speaks of a particular relationship to capital marked by the tension of difference in the horizons of time. The “precapitalist,” on the basis of this argument, can only be imagined as something that exists within the temporal horizon of capital and that at the same time disrupts the continuity of this time by suggesting another time that is not on the same, secular, homogeneous calendar (which is why what is precapital is…
Subaltern histories written with an eye to difference cannot constitute yet another attempt, in the long and universalistic tradition of “socialist” histories, to help erect the subaltern as the subject of modern democracies, that is, to expand the history of the modern in such a way as to make it more representative of society as a whole. This is a laudable objective on its own terms and has undoubted global relevance. But thought does not have to stop at political democracy or the concept of egalitarian distribution of wealth (though the aim of achieving these ends will legitimately fuel many…
One historicizes only insofar as one belongs to a mode of being in the world that is aligned with the principle of “disenchantment of the universe,” which underlies knowledge in the social sciences (and I distinguish knowledge from practice). But “disenchantment” is not the only principle by which we world the earth. The supernatural can inhabit the world in these other modes of worlding, and not always as a problem or result of conscious belief or ideas. The point is made in an anecdote about the poet W. B. Yeats, whose interest in fairies and other nonhuman beings of Irish…
Why was it important that the modern individual be conceptualized in terms of this internal struggle between passion/sentiments and reason ? Timothy Mitchell’s discussion of Durkheim in Colonising Egypt offers a suggestive answer. The very conception of modern individual, Mitchell says in discussing Durkheim’s texts, poses a threat to the conception of the social and the general, for if individuals are endowed with infinite individuality (which is what the drama of passions is supposed to reveal—each person his or her own novelist and analysand at the same time), what is there to guarantee the unity of the social ? What would prevent…