In a milieu inundated by ever more striking and sophisticated technologies, television may appear... more In a milieu inundated by ever more striking and sophisticated technologies, television may appear to us a dated medium, too familiar to provoke any special interest despite its pervasive influence. But when in the 1980s in India the TV started to become a feature of middle-class homes it was no less than a magical device –on one hand, treasured by the state (which controlled broadcasting rights) for its instant effects and extensive reach and, on the other, its rationed telecasts eagerly awaited, and gaped at, by fascinated masses. This technological development coincided with a period of important upheavals in the nation’s nascent postcolonial history and politics. Till the 1970s, the Congress had ruled as the preeminent national party, the overarching vanguard “uplifting” India and its populace into the committee of nations and peoples of the world. By then, however, the limitations of a putative democratic socialism had combined with other national and global developments to unde...
This article focuses on ‘dread’ in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the d... more This article focuses on ‘dread’ in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the dread of everyday existence, which is as salient in a biographical temporality as it pervades the phenomenal environment, connects and transfers between religious practices and everyday life in India for the marginalized masses. For such dread, dominant liberal discourses, such as those of the nation, economy, or ego-centric performance, have neither the patience nor the forms to represent, perform, and abreact. Formulated in dialogue with critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory, this article conceives of religious practices in continuum with the economic, social, ethical, and political realms, and the repressions thereof. Focused on a rapidly expanding religious movement in India, it challenges normative discourses of religious practitioners as fundamentalists or reactionaries, and strives to extend the imperatives of recent critical urban ethnography into the domain of...
This article describes the narratives and projections that shaped the contested character of Hard... more This article describes the narratives and projections that shaped the contested character of Hardwar and the river Ganges as symbols par excellence of the Hindus’ claim to India’s sacred geography over the last two hundred years. It deliberates on the tactics and practices through which Hardwar’s ancient and legendary status has been employed to assert Hindu identity and territorial claims vis-à-vis the colonial administrators, but also to exclude the country’s Muslim and Christian populace. The purifying, divine land of Hardwar enabled the nationalist imagination and struggle for a Hindu India, even as it was instituted as a site for the internal purification of Hinduism itself, to mirror its glorious past. The article describes the contests and claims, based on religion and class, as well as the performance of socio-economic and existential anxieties that the sacred quality of Hardwar and the river Ganges continues to authorize and enable in post-colonial India. For this, we draw ...
This article undertakes a conceptual analysis of the notion of ‘resistance’ in the context of eth... more This article undertakes a conceptual analysis of the notion of ‘resistance’ in the context of ethnographic research on an expanding mass religious movement in contemporary India. Sociologists usually see such growing religious phenomena as ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘reactionary’ and are skeptical of the component of social resistance to them. I argue that this reflects a flawed framing of ‘resistance’, in a teleological, modernist paradigm. Instead, this article advances an alternate understanding of ‘resistance’ in a hermeneutic that interweaves the phenomenological critiques of Hegelian philosophy, Kant’s connections between ethics and freedom, and the pairing of resistance with transference in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Bringing the lessons of psychoanalytic practice with critical ethnography, I argue that such re-articulation of ‘resistance’ is indispensable for a radical epistemology that can encounter the infectious certitudes and new, global infrastructures of repressive power and violence.
This article relates certain figures of the subject in an emergent Indian pilgrimage. On the basi... more This article relates certain figures of the subject in an emergent Indian pilgrimage. On the basis of ethnographic research and 15 in-depth interviews, I show that these religious subjectivities, phenomenologically immersed in highly precarious material conditions, are radically relational. Observations on the pilgrimage (en)counter the cognitivist assumptions of a body of scholarly opinion on contemporary religious practice. The analyst's attention
The discourse of karma (behavior), confounded with inherent psychic and material substance of the... more The discourse of karma (behavior), confounded with inherent psychic and material substance of the person/group (guna), was at the heart of India's caste ideology. This systematic and intuitive, albeit convoluted and phantasmic doctrine was critical to bridge the discrepancy between a pantheistic religious imaginary and the reality of exclusion and abjection. Although " karma " evokes an exotic orient, this ideology is near identical with the ideas of " idleness " and " instant gratification " used to make sense of racial inequities in the contemporary United States. In both cases, the idea of behavioral and moral deficiency is used to justify evident abjection and discrimination, within the frame of an encompassing ideology of social equality. Thus, this use of the notions of " work " and " discipline, " extrapolated to the moral quality of the group or individual, is no passing argument of the " new racism. " It is a proven ploy of assigning blame on the victim.
This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism a... more This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, and its connections with the formations of racism in classical liberalism and its colonial character. I show the pragmatic and discursive operations of neo-racism in the context of this shift to a neo-liberal discourse, drawing particularly on Michel Foucault's seminars, Society Must be Defended, and Birth of Bio-politics. Insofar as " race " cannot be understood as a discrete category outside its social, economic, moral, and political embeddedness in liberalism, I argue that methodological individualism and expectations of high-specialization constrain the theorization of race in U.S. scholarship. Racial lines will continue to be (re)excavated, borrowed, or inscribed afresh to channel, reinforce, and institutionalize the social violence that neo-liberalism must unleash.
This article focuses on 'dread' in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the d... more This article focuses on 'dread' in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the dread of everyday existence, which is as salient in a biographical temporality as it pervades the phenomenal environment, connects and transfers between religious practices and everyday life in India for the marginalized masses. For such dread, dominant liberal discourses, such as those of the nation, economy, or ego-centric performance, have neither the patience nor the forms to represent, perform, and abreact. Formulated in dialogue with critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory, this article conceives of religious practices in continuum with the economic, social, ethical, and political realms, and the repressions thereof. Focused on a rapidly expanding religious movement in India, it challenges normative discourses of religious practitioners as fundamentalists or reactionaries, and strives to extend the imperatives of recent critical urban ethnography into the domain of religious practice.
In a milieu inundated by ever more striking and sophisticated technologies, television may appear... more In a milieu inundated by ever more striking and sophisticated technologies, television may appear to us a dated medium, too familiar to provoke any special interest despite its pervasive influence. But when in the 1980s in India the TV started to become a feature of middle-class homes it was no less than a magical device –on one hand, treasured by the state (which controlled broadcasting rights) for its instant effects and extensive reach and, on the other, its rationed telecasts eagerly awaited, and gaped at, by fascinated masses. This technological development coincided with a period of important upheavals in the nation’s nascent postcolonial history and politics. Till the 1970s, the Congress had ruled as the preeminent national party, the overarching vanguard “uplifting” India and its populace into the committee of nations and peoples of the world. By then, however, the limitations of a putative democratic socialism had combined with other national and global developments to unde...
This article focuses on ‘dread’ in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the d... more This article focuses on ‘dread’ in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the dread of everyday existence, which is as salient in a biographical temporality as it pervades the phenomenal environment, connects and transfers between religious practices and everyday life in India for the marginalized masses. For such dread, dominant liberal discourses, such as those of the nation, economy, or ego-centric performance, have neither the patience nor the forms to represent, perform, and abreact. Formulated in dialogue with critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory, this article conceives of religious practices in continuum with the economic, social, ethical, and political realms, and the repressions thereof. Focused on a rapidly expanding religious movement in India, it challenges normative discourses of religious practitioners as fundamentalists or reactionaries, and strives to extend the imperatives of recent critical urban ethnography into the domain of...
This article describes the narratives and projections that shaped the contested character of Hard... more This article describes the narratives and projections that shaped the contested character of Hardwar and the river Ganges as symbols par excellence of the Hindus’ claim to India’s sacred geography over the last two hundred years. It deliberates on the tactics and practices through which Hardwar’s ancient and legendary status has been employed to assert Hindu identity and territorial claims vis-à-vis the colonial administrators, but also to exclude the country’s Muslim and Christian populace. The purifying, divine land of Hardwar enabled the nationalist imagination and struggle for a Hindu India, even as it was instituted as a site for the internal purification of Hinduism itself, to mirror its glorious past. The article describes the contests and claims, based on religion and class, as well as the performance of socio-economic and existential anxieties that the sacred quality of Hardwar and the river Ganges continues to authorize and enable in post-colonial India. For this, we draw ...
This article undertakes a conceptual analysis of the notion of ‘resistance’ in the context of eth... more This article undertakes a conceptual analysis of the notion of ‘resistance’ in the context of ethnographic research on an expanding mass religious movement in contemporary India. Sociologists usually see such growing religious phenomena as ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘reactionary’ and are skeptical of the component of social resistance to them. I argue that this reflects a flawed framing of ‘resistance’, in a teleological, modernist paradigm. Instead, this article advances an alternate understanding of ‘resistance’ in a hermeneutic that interweaves the phenomenological critiques of Hegelian philosophy, Kant’s connections between ethics and freedom, and the pairing of resistance with transference in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Bringing the lessons of psychoanalytic practice with critical ethnography, I argue that such re-articulation of ‘resistance’ is indispensable for a radical epistemology that can encounter the infectious certitudes and new, global infrastructures of repressive power and violence.
This article relates certain figures of the subject in an emergent Indian pilgrimage. On the basi... more This article relates certain figures of the subject in an emergent Indian pilgrimage. On the basis of ethnographic research and 15 in-depth interviews, I show that these religious subjectivities, phenomenologically immersed in highly precarious material conditions, are radically relational. Observations on the pilgrimage (en)counter the cognitivist assumptions of a body of scholarly opinion on contemporary religious practice. The analyst's attention
The discourse of karma (behavior), confounded with inherent psychic and material substance of the... more The discourse of karma (behavior), confounded with inherent psychic and material substance of the person/group (guna), was at the heart of India's caste ideology. This systematic and intuitive, albeit convoluted and phantasmic doctrine was critical to bridge the discrepancy between a pantheistic religious imaginary and the reality of exclusion and abjection. Although " karma " evokes an exotic orient, this ideology is near identical with the ideas of " idleness " and " instant gratification " used to make sense of racial inequities in the contemporary United States. In both cases, the idea of behavioral and moral deficiency is used to justify evident abjection and discrimination, within the frame of an encompassing ideology of social equality. Thus, this use of the notions of " work " and " discipline, " extrapolated to the moral quality of the group or individual, is no passing argument of the " new racism. " It is a proven ploy of assigning blame on the victim.
This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism a... more This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, and its connections with the formations of racism in classical liberalism and its colonial character. I show the pragmatic and discursive operations of neo-racism in the context of this shift to a neo-liberal discourse, drawing particularly on Michel Foucault's seminars, Society Must be Defended, and Birth of Bio-politics. Insofar as " race " cannot be understood as a discrete category outside its social, economic, moral, and political embeddedness in liberalism, I argue that methodological individualism and expectations of high-specialization constrain the theorization of race in U.S. scholarship. Racial lines will continue to be (re)excavated, borrowed, or inscribed afresh to channel, reinforce, and institutionalize the social violence that neo-liberalism must unleash.
This article focuses on 'dread' in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the d... more This article focuses on 'dread' in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the dread of everyday existence, which is as salient in a biographical temporality as it pervades the phenomenal environment, connects and transfers between religious practices and everyday life in India for the marginalized masses. For such dread, dominant liberal discourses, such as those of the nation, economy, or ego-centric performance, have neither the patience nor the forms to represent, perform, and abreact. Formulated in dialogue with critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory, this article conceives of religious practices in continuum with the economic, social, ethical, and political realms, and the repressions thereof. Focused on a rapidly expanding religious movement in India, it challenges normative discourses of religious practitioners as fundamentalists or reactionaries, and strives to extend the imperatives of recent critical urban ethnography into the domain of religious practice.
The English-language issue of Contradictions, vol. 2, includes texts by Dan Swain on Marxism and ... more The English-language issue of Contradictions, vol. 2, includes texts by Dan Swain on Marxism and theories of justice, Nicole Pepperell on Lukács, Peter Steiner on Václav Havel, Robert Kalivoda on Marx and Freud, Alain Badiou on communism, and others. For more, see https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/en/archive
This chapter draws attention to the analytical, representational, and ethical problems of the “so... more This chapter draws attention to the analytical, representational, and ethical problems of the “sociological method” in three different empirical settings – a religious movement in India, neo-casteism/racism, and reception of commercial televisual entertainment. Departing from disciplinary caveats, it seamlessly transfers between the social and the psychic to arrive at inferences very different from widely prevalent sociological conceptions of these phenomena. The chapter demonstrates in these cases, the paradoxes of performance and recognition in an informal economy; ethics and the violence of everyday life in emergent neo-liberal conditions; sexual anxieties; aesthetic conflicts that invite re-thinking “caste” and race; and the construction of the fantasy spaces of television serials. In contrast, it concludes, abiding by normative disciplinary convention would undermine concrete intersections and confine the analysis to stereotypical perceptions and narrow sub-fields.
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For more, see https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/en/archive