Against the Nation by Sasanka Perera;Dev Nath Pathak;Ravi Kumar;

Author:Sasanka Perera;Dev Nath Pathak;Ravi Kumar;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Anthropological South Asia

Thinking through Utopias Amidst Intellectual Hegemonies1

Dev Nath Pathak

The idea of ‘Anthropological South Asia’ presupposes an ability to transcend national-territorial confines. Within each national-territorial confine, there is a history of doing anthropology. Each such confine is presumably a little republic of anthropologists operating with preferences, pride and prejudices in accordance with the sociopolitical and cultural priorities of the confines. Anthropologists of India would not read anthropologists from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or Nepal. The scene may be slightly different if some of the local scholars from these confines dislocate and relocate themselves in the premier institutes in the western hemisphere. Curiously though, many of the non-Indian scholars from across South Asia tend to feed themselves on the literatures produced by chosen few Indian scholars. But on the whole, there has been an evident dearth of mutual respect, cross border intellectual engagement and sharing of theoretical, empirical and analytical interest. For example, more than half of sociology and social anthropology in India may be considered to be focussed on the study of caste. But there is seldom an attempt to read caste as a regional phenomenon or at least be informed about the existence of caste features in societies across borders in the cartographic neighbourhood. In this wake, one is bound to notice an Indian hegemony in intellectual and academic terms.

In this sense, our probing question shall be, as to how an anthropological South Asia is possible, in such a grave scenario of little republics further vexed by issues of hegemony?

However, to make the challenge a little more nuanced, we shall be concerned with many levels of hegemony in the production and circulation of academic knowledge. Euro-centrism, which was about the predominance of the knowledge generated in the European context, is not yet dead. Indeed it has become more complex with other additions, making it more a Euro-American hegemony. The stakeholders in the politics of production and circulation of knowledge have multiplied. The global South Asian scholarship rivals with Euro-American hegemony in knowledge politics. In many ways, this is a new avatar of the erstwhile intellectual predominance of Euro-American scholarship. Often, it seems that global South Asian scholars are content with the kind of view of South Asian societies and polity that has been formulated in the waiting lounges of airports or fly-by-night operations run by paid research assistants. Global South Asian scholars tend to celebrate their identity defined by the number of visas they accumulate on their passport. Many local scholars of the region lustfully and self-consciously join in the competition of collecting visas on their passports too and hence they speak highly of the places they visit. Mass-produced souvenirs from global capitals adorn their walls. These days, there is also quite an evident tendency of reducing academic visits to a few selfies or Facebook status updates on where one is flying to rather than a deeper engagement with what one has actually done. It is visible that we are living in the time of the ‘selfy-academic’ in general and sociologists and social anthropologists helplessly abide by the terms and conditions of this regime.

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