Abstract
Saurabh Dube. 2023. Disciplines of Modernity: Archives, Histories, Anthropologies. Oxon: Routledge. xiv + 136 pp. References, index. £45.99 (hardback—ISBN: 9781032389394).
Postmodern/poststructuralist critiques of modernity have taken on the role of messiness, ambivalence and uncertainty in the imagination of the modern world, otherwise depicted as a universally rational, disenchanted, ordered and controlled space. Disciplines of Modernity is an attempt to revisit these uncertainties, focusing on the co-emergence of history and anthropology as academic disciplines considered contradictory, but mutually producing domains of knowledge. The book, by travelling through the contentious and contested histories of modernity and the 20th-century critiques of those histories, emphasises the power asymmetries produced by the concepts and practices of these disciplines.
The introduction and the first chapter engage in descriptive narration with the existing perspectives on the history of the academic disciplines—in this context, history and anthropology—along with the histories of modernity. Beginning with the Enlightenment, the description moves through colonialism, nation and nationalism and the poststructuralist, feminist and subaltern critiques of modernity that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. The author claims that within this wide-ranging, contested and multi-perspective debate, there are assumptions of history and anthropology as already formed disciplines, and hence available for analysis—historical or hermeneutic. The critical question, according to the author, is ‘How are we to read and render the human sciences as disciplines of modernity ahead of always prior images of the native and already a priori imaginaries of the modern?’ (p. 41).
The third and fourth chapters, which engage with questions of marginalisation and privilege, interrupt the previous conversations in multiple ways. In these two chapters, the highly technical language and higher degrees of abstraction and theorisation that characterise the first two chapters are substituted with empirical modality as an analytical framework. Dube brings the concept of Dalit religions in dealing with the theme of marginalisation (following the author’s earlier works). Here, the scholarly debate on theories of caste, from Louis Dumont to Nicholas Dirks, is briefly revisited. The author problematises the division between ritual power and political power that underlies this debate and argues that ‘the normative hierarchy of purity and pollution and the principles of a ritually central kingship/dominant caste should not be seen as separate and opposite principles’ (p. 51). The category of Dalit religions, Dube argues, ‘militates against singular solutions, ready resolutions, intellectual- academic aggrandizements—a priori or otherwise, theoretical or empirical, conceptual or factual’ (p. 55). The analysis of the question of privilege is mostly in autobiographical narrative and ethnographic modality. While the picture of the elite and privileged that emerges through these narratives is somewhat apparent, a reader might wonder how this chapter contributes to the arc of the arguments in the book! The author may have intended to reveal their location to the readers and engage in self-critique, but one can only speculate.
The last chapter returns to the modality of abstract theoretical discussion, focusing on what the author calls modern scholasticism, which substitutes any contentious ‘is’ with their own ‘ought’ in the academic and everyday world. The author argues that the privileging of ‘ought’ is the constitutive nature of academic scholarship, including that which questions privilege. So the critical task is to ‘trace instead the pervasive subordination of the immanent, the affective, the everyday, the extra-analytical, and the mundane to the imperatives of a scholastic reason and adjudicatory rationality’ (p. 97).
In following the author’s critical approach to scholastic reasoning, one can see the limits of this ‘critique’ through how the book chapters are orchestrated and curated. When one has to engage in abstract theoretical discussion (chapters 1, 2 and 5), the reference is immediately located in Western scholarship. Immanuel Kant, Habermas, and Donna Haraway are situated in the same plane of theorisation in the book. In other words, all of them, including the author, are engaged in a similar practice: theorisation. On the other hand, the discussion of marginalisation (chapter 4) brings back the Dalit scholarship, but only to be archived and to work as an empirical source for further theorisation. Here, the Dalit scholarship serves the role of an informant. This is not the book’s or author’s limitation but the very nature of expert knowledge itself. The problem is not that in the translation of experience, or more generally of ‘doing’, into written narratives, we are losing the crux of the matter, and it is also not that the two are not located in the same domain. The more critical problem is this: Due to unequal power relations, the translation, often, instead of just being another ‘doing’, starts to replace that which is translated and becomes more authentic than the original. The book itself signals this danger when it asks: ‘What is at stake in enquiring whether the most careful, creative of “our” understandings might yet subsume and subordinate—to compelling claims that we hold—contradictory worlds and their contentions?’ (p. 100).
This book is an essential read for specialists engaging with the philosophy and politics of academic disciplines and knowledge production. While many of the book’s arguments resonate with poststructuralist and feminist scholarship, the new assembling and arrangements create new impressions with an effective force. Above all, in the current context of claims of appropriations and misreading in academics, one should appreciate the courage to expose oneself to vulnerabilities through critical self-reflection.