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Scrupulously based in anthropology and history - and drawing on social theory and critical thought - this book revisits the disciplines, archives, and subjects of modernity. There are at least three interleaving emphases here. To begin with, the work rethinks institutionalized formations of anthropology and history - together with "archives" at large - as themselves intimating disciplines of modernity. Understood in the widest senses of the terms, these disciplines are constitutively contradictory. Moreover, the study interrupts familiar projections of modern subjects as molded a priori by a disenchanted calculus of interest and reason. It tracks instead the affective, embodied, and immanent attributes of our varied worlds as formative of subjects of modernity, sown into their substance and spirit. Finally, running through the book is a querying of entitlement and privilege that underlie social terrains and their scholarly apprehensions - articulating at once distinct elites, pervasive plutocracies, and modern "scholasticisms."

Intro -- Foreword -- Preface -- 1. An Introduction -- Primary matters -- Key questions -- Critical concerns -- Unraveling orientations: the postcolonial and the subaltern -- Historical anthropology -- Pathways -- Notes -- 2. Intimations of modernity: time and space -- Early encounters -- Apprentice engagements -- Journeyman entanglements -- Latter-​day enmeshments -- Notes -- 3. Maps of modernity: antinomies and enticements -- Overture -- Abiding antinomies -- Untangling modernity -- Distinctions of modernity -- Other moderns -- Coda -- Notes -- 4. Disciplines of modernity: entanglements and ambiguities -- Anthropology and time -- Ethnography and temporality: key protagonists -- History and culture -- Anthropology: ambiguities and reconfigurations -- History: ambiguities and reconfigurations -- At the end -- Notes -- 5. Margins of modernity: identities and incitements -- Untangling identity -- Colony and empire -- Pasts and communities -- Nation and modernity -- Coda -- Notes -- 6. Modern subjects: an epilogue -- Overture -- Genealogies -- Formations -- Emergences -- Coda -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

This book thinks through modernity and its representations by exploring critical considerations of time and space. Drawing on anthropology, history and social theory, it investigates the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity. Crucially, it understands these antinomies not as errors, but as constitutive elements of modern worlds. The book questions routine portrayals of homogeneous time and antinomian blueprints of cultural space, while acknowledging the production of time and space by social subjects. Instead of assuming a straightforward, singular trajectory for the phenomena, it views modernity as involving checkered, contingent and contended processes of meaning and power, which have found heterogeneous historical elaborations over the past five centuries. Bringing together past and present, theory and narrative, it sows the historical, ethnographic and methodological deep into its critical procedures, offering an innovative understanding of cultural identities and imaginatively exploring the relationship between history and anthropology.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Foreword -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1: Modernity and its Enchantments: An Introduction -- Effects: Colony and Nation -- 2: North Atlantic Universals: Analytical Fictions, 1492-1945 -- 3: Coloniality at Large: Time and the Colonial Difference -- 4: The Space of Empire and the Territory of Nations -- 5: Sanitizing Modernity: Imperial Hygiene, Obscenity, and Moral Regulation in Colonial India -- 6: Conversion to Translation: Colonial Registers of a Vernacular Christianity -- 7: The Moment of Criticism in Indian Nationalist Thought: Ramchandra Shukla and the Poetics of a Hindi Responsibility -- 8: Gandhi's Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram -- 9: Illiberal Islam -- 10 Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture -- Affects: The Global and the Vernacular -- 11: Affect: What is it Good for? -- 12: The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers. Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism -- 13: The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism -- 14: The Martyrdom of Mosques: Imagery and Iconoclasm in Modern Pakistan -- 15: Mental Illness and the Urban Poor: Psychiatric Institutions and the Singularity of Lives -- 16: The Time of Slavery -- 17: Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism -- 18: The Beautiful Expanding Future of Poverty: Popular Economics as Psychological Defence -- Notes on Contributors.

Este ensayo explora las cuestiones de la inmanencia mundana y la trascendencia secular centrándose en la escolástica moderna. Dicha escolástica emplea procedimientos omnipresentes que convierten su caso particular en historia general, olvidando las condiciones que lo hacen posible. Es exactamente esa espectacularidad la que el ensayo denomina trascendencia secular: suposiciones implícitas de un conocimiento inmaculado que ocluye e ignora las huellas y rastros de su nacimiento maculado en el mundo. Frente a esto se contrapone la presencia de la inmanencia mundana, que milita contra los supuestos rutinarios del desencanto de -y el desapego hacia- el mundo. Aprovechando esa inmanencia mundana, el ensayo explora críticamente cómo la escolástica moderna y la trascendencia secular engendran y denotan formidablemente el privilegio cultural de los ámbitos académicos, encarnado a la vez en las convenciones conceptuales de estos últimos, así como en sus mundos vitales cotidianos.

This essay explores issues of worldly immanence and secular transcendence by focusing on modern scholasticism. Such scholasticisms intimate pervasive procedures that turn their particular case into the general story while forgetting the conditions that make this possible. It is exactly such spectacular conjuring that the essay refers to as secular transcendence: implicit assumptions of immaculate knowledge that occlude and ignore the traces and tracks of its maculate birth in the world. Against this is contrasted the presence of worldly immanence, which militates against routine assumptions of the disenchantment of – and detachment toward – the world. Seizing upon such worldly immanence, the essay critically explores how modern scholasticism and secular transcendence formidably beget and betoken the cultural privilege of academic arenas, embodied at once in the latter's conceptual conventions as well as their everyday life-worlds.

This book explores modernity, the disciplines, and their interplay by drawing in critical considerations of time, space, and their enmeshments. Based in anthropology and history, and drawing on social-political theory (as well as other, complementary, critical perspectives), it focuses on socio-spatial/disciplinary subjects and hierarchical-coeval tousled temporalities. The spatial/temporal templates reveal how modern enticements and antinomies, far from being analytical abstractions, intimate instead ontological attributes and experiential dimensions of the worlds in which we live, and the spaces and times that we inhabit and articulate. Then, the book considers the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity. At the same time, rather than approach such antinomies, enticements, and ambiguities as analytical errors or historical lacks, which await their correction or overcoming, it attempts to critically yet cautiously unfold these elements as constitutive of modern worlds. The book draws on social theory, political philosophy, and other scholarship in the critical humanities in order to make its claims concerning the mutual binds between everyday oppositions, routine enchantments, temporal ruptures, and spatial hierarchies of a modern provenance. Then, it turns to issues of identity and modernity. Finally, the book explores the terms of modernism on the Indian subcontinent.