Season 05 - Episode 01: Who’s Afraid of Universals?

Feb 2

In this episode, a professor-student pair, Dr. Atreyee Majumder and Manhar Bansal, provide a glimpse into their ongoing conversation on the enduring role of universal categories and their relationship to anthropological knowledge. In light of the discomfort around universals in contemporary social sciences, they offer the provocation: can there be universals beyond those of capitalist modernity? They talk about the dominant time-space compression account of modernity, the possibility of uncovering other, more liberating and revolutionary temporalities, and the fun of doing theory in anthropology. They argue for the need to revisit the question of universal categories to think through our time and politics, albeit on a broader canvas. Tune in to ask, along with them, who’s afraid of universals?

TRANSCRIPT:

SPEAKERS

Manhar Bansal, Atreyee Majumder, Anar Parikh

Anar Parikh 00:21

Hi everyone! Thanks for joining us for another episode of Anthropological Airwaves, the official podcast of the journal American Anthropologist. It’s a new year, and for us, that means it’s also a new season! You’re listening to Season Five – Episode One: Who’s Afraid of Universals? My name is Anar Parikh, and I am the journal’s podcast editor and the Executive Producer of this show. We’re back with a lineup of great new episodes which we strive to release monthly—sometimes more successfully than others.

Anar Parikh 00:59

Before we get to today’s episode, I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on the land acknowledgement that typically introduces Anthropological Airwaves episodes. Recently, I have been reflecting on what that land acknowledgement does and whether it continues to be appropriate to this podcast. When I began running Anthropological Airwaves in 2020, I put together a territory acknowledgement that mirrored the language American Anthropologist uses in the journal, recognizing the traditional homelands of the Anacostia and Potomac peoples on whose territories the main headquarters of American Anthropologist’s editorial offices are located. Individual episodes, however, are not usually recorded, edited, or produced on those same territories, and so, for many individual episodes, I also wrote and recorded a statement recognizing the specific lands on which they were created. As the official podcast of the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, these statements were meant to recognize the harm the journal and the discipline have caused to Indigenous people and communities and make an express commitment to repairing these relationships while keeping in mind that acknowledging territory is only one small step towards doing so. At the same time, I have also been grappling with the disjuncture between land acknowledgements and individual, disciplinary, and institutional failures to make good on their fundamental material premise: to return Indigenous lands to their rightful and traditional stewards. Our statements were hegemonically North American in their formulation and inadequate to episodes that were made and concern people in other parts of the world. Last year, for example, we published episodes that were recorded, edited, and produced in Ireland, the Netherlands, Cyprus and Argentina—whose respective histories of coloniality did not fit into the mold of a territory acknowledgement scripted using the North American model. Today’s episode comes to us from India, were coloniality takes shape not only in through the legacy of British colonialism but through the ongoing persecution of caste and religious minorities by a Brahminical Hindu state. In light of these considerations, I, as American Anthropologist’s podcast editor and the executive producer of Anthropological Airwaves, will be taking the next few months to reevaluate how this show can actively advance anticolonial politics and scholarship. Beyond independently authoring these statements myself as I have in the past, I endeavor, in particular, to develop a more dialogic process with Anthropological Airwaves contributors in order to make specific connections between the legacy of coloniality and the scholarly work happening in each episode. If you have thoughts on this topic and would like to continue this conversation, please reach out to us via email at amanthpodcast@gmail.com, or on Twitter, where American Anthropologist’s handle is @amanthjournal. I would love to hear from you.

Anar Parikh 04:26

Alright y’all, it’s time to introduce today’s episode, which is about the enduring role of universal categories and their relationship to anthropological knowledge. This conversation is brought to us by guest producers Dr. Atreyee Majumder, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore and her student, Manhar Bansal---an undergraduate student of bachelor of arts and law at the National Law School of India University. This episode emerges out of an ongoing conversation between the two that was prompted by a paper Bansal wrote for one of Dr. Majumder’s classes. I love their rapport and diligent intellectual engagement with another. It is a beautiful illustration of the generative intellectual relationship possible between teachers and students.

Atreyee Majumder 05:40

Hello, everyone, I'm Atreyee Majumder.

Manhar Bansal 05:42

Hi, I'm Manhar Bansal, and in this episode of Anthro Airwaves, we are here to give you a glimpse of an ongoing conversation between the two of us on the enduring role of universal categories and the relationship to anthropological knowledge.

Atreyee Majumder 05:57

But first, before we get on to the meat of our conversation, I want to remind our audience that we're talking all the way from India, we're located in Bangalore, and a bit of context might help as to how this conversation emerged between the two of us. Manhar is my student at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, where I teach sociology. In India, as you know, sociology and social anthropology are often taught together. And Manhar wrote a paper in my Core Sociology One, which is an introductory course, which in which he referred to this question of what a universal is, and we got talking, and this conversation that emerged from his paper is something that will form the meat of our conversation today, and it's an ongoing intellectual collaboration. Why don't you say a little bit about what you wrote in your paper?

Manhar Bansal 06:50

Sure. It was in January this year that I wrote a response paper to Anna Tsing's much acclaimed book Friction published in 2005. It was probably the first time that I was properly acquainted with the terms of universals and universalism. What I found interesting about Tsing's theory was the conversation that she envisioned between the universal and what is known as the particular and a special interest to me in her book were the chapters on freedom, where she explores how activists in Indonesia, the Indonesian rainforest, which forms the backdrop of her ethnography, how these activists use the universalizing rhetoric of rights and freedom to organize local coalition's and make possible new politics responding to the universals of freedom rights, and civil society. The movement in Indonesia produces its own modality of how a coalition works, and how social justice is achieved. Against this background, I tried to argue in my paper that every universal is in the ultimate analysis a particular. The universal for freedom, for instance, is I argued contingent on its originary particularity of Western enlightenment reduced idea of what it means to be a free individual. I sent this essay to you for feedback in March, and we ended up having a conversation, which can only be called illuminating. You were of the opinion that while the universal/particular debate is well and good, the universals we talk about are all confined to capitalist modernity. As I looked through the notes of one of our earliest meetings, I read the following. What is the value of a universal if we minimize the effect of modernity? Modernity is actually a very small fraction of time, depending on how we conceptualize ourselves, we can be very well located elsewhere. And I think that is the question we have been trying to wrestle with in these past eight months.

Atreyee Majumder 08:44

Indeed. We offer today therefore, for our audience a few provocations on the nature of universals per se, their origins, they spread and flourish across large scales of time. But first, should we begin by explaining a little bit about what we mean by universals? What are universals? Can you say a little bit about that, Manhar?

Manhar Bansal 09:05

Absolutely. I think there's a dire need to really understand and get a handle on what this word even means. Because ever since we began our conversation, I myself have been struggling with articulating exactly what we mean by Universal. provisionally, I've come to understand the universal the way we use it at least, to be a better idea and ambitious category A claim which seeks to at once expand and restrict our imaginative faculties.

Atreyee Majumder 09:35

Can you say a little bit more about that, please? What do you mean by restrict and expand?

Manhar Bansal 09:40

Actually, this definition, if you will, of universals as an imaginative project, which which restrict and expand our faculties is inspired from Ben Anderson's work on the category of the nation. Now everyone knows as Anderson famously calls the nation, an imagined community with the advent of modernity and nation states, we've all come to imagine ourselves as being part of one or the other nation. And this idea is so pervasive that even in its absence, it prevails. Think about refugee populations, for instance, aren't they and the agencies which work with them, always in an endeavor to get them statehood? In other words, even in its absence, the universal of nationhood and nationalism remains universal. Therefore, make us imagine a certain way of life as the correct way of life and limit our imaginative contours from contemplating alternative ways. And mind you this doesn't happen out of nowhere, for an idea to gain the purchase that a universal has, it must be supported by political economic and cultural power. Therefore, universalism is also a deeply hegemonic enterprise. Freedom, for instance, right? The idea that freedom is something that everyone aspires for, or should aspire for, is rooted in a Western conception of individualism. In fact, the very words I'm using to define a universal Western individualism, aspiration, all these words are, in some ways, universal ideas. They are entrenched in our daily lives to the point that the percolate our vocabulary.

Atreyee Majumder 11:12

So how do you perceive universals, then as ideas? Are all big ideas universal?

Manhar Bansal 11:17

No, I wouldn't say that all big ideas are universals universal categories, I think possess the peculiar characteristic of being particularly powerful, powerful forces. And they have the ability to invoke another thing, which are introduced in the beginning of a conversation, to travel and become unmoored from their cultural specificities. If we go back to freedom, for instance, the idea of freedom, individualistic freedom, as we know it today, may have arisen in the socio historical context of the West. However, over time, with the deployment of various technologies of colonial and neocolonial power, the conceptual category of freedom has acquired enough purchase that it seems to be all powerful, transcendental, almost a given now why certain ideas become universals, while others do not. It's a complex story and one that needs to be told. But our ongoing conversation is a little different, right? Most of the existing scholarship on universalism deals with the kind of universal/particular dyad that I've just highlighted. In political theory, for instance, Immanuel Kant's, famous idea of the categorical imperative. And the universalizing capacity for moral reasoning, has been challenged by feminist and race scholars who argue that this excludes the concrete particularized other a black woman, a gay man, a Dalit person whose particularities are sought to be transcended by this overarching larger category of ":rational agent." You, however, are interested in shifting the terms of this debate altogether aren't you? You suggest that we move away from a perspective of a spatial expanse of things traveling universal to one of time. Could you share with our audience why and how you came across this idea of universals across time, why do you think this is an important project, both in terms of its inherent significance and what it contributes to existing scholarship?

Atreyee Majumder 13:09

Well, I think I encountered universals much before I actually knew that word, you know. I grew up in middle class, Calcutta where many, many kids like me, their heads were populated with pretty large ideas by the time we were teenagers. And these were ideas that were contextual, that were populated with familiar and immediate descriptors, although they were large and powerful ideas. Like for instance, what I knew to be a city. I had some idea as to what a big city was, by the time I got out of Calcutta and came to Bangalore to go to college. Having lived in Bangalore for a while and some other descriptors got added to that category "city." And this the category called "city" in my head grew and expanded to include those descriptors as well. By the time I was 20 years old, I felt I had some big ideas in in my mind, which were not fully described by my particular circumstances. And this is where I think universals are born. universals are born at a time where a idea starts to grow out of its particular circumstances of origin and tries to take a transcontextual character or attribute. Universals are powerful and dangerous ideas. Not that they can't be powerful and useful ideas, but they're definitely also dangerous ideas. They can be used to deny other ways of living. They can be used to justify political, economic and social incursions into our society. There's a certain kind of givenness about universals that that populate the range of ideas in which we live in the current world. For instance, the assumption is that universals mean, universals in the current world, the late capitalist modern world consists of something like freedom, individualism, all the things that you mentioned. But I wonder if those are the only kind of range of universal that are available to us. If we shift the axis to time, then we can expand the idea and the contour of who or what a universal is completely. And that is where I think our conversation today lies and our ongoing conversation lies. It is a critique of the modernist presentist lens through which universalism is constructed today. So, we've been reading some, some of the important scholarship on modernity with regards to our inquiry about universals, haven't we? Can you say from your perspectives, why pinning universalism, universal categories to capitalist modernity might be a problem?

Manhar Bansal 15:53

I think simply because there are other times we belong to as humankind, right? I remember one of the first things you said, when we just began this project, which excited me to jump on the wagon. And you said that "we belong to a millennium, an hour and a moment simultaneously." Now that I thought, and I still think, is a beautiful and a powerful idea. And I believe that the job of critical social theory, in anthropology and other social sciences is to uncover these other times. Times, which may, which may not be confined to the here and now of capitalist modernity, right? If you if you had to think about the ideas we have been talking about, we've talked about justice, freedom, individuality, aspiration. Unfortunately, because we're located in modernity in the 21st century, our conception of the world is also tied and restricted to it. Our universals are a composition of the ingredients of modernity. When we think about freedom, we inevitably think about being an independent individual, who can live their life as they wish, without interference from society or the state. Similarly, when we say aspiration, we mean individual ambition, right? The desire to become something: a CEO, a top lawyer, a Supreme Court judge, a celebrated and respected academic, a successful person. Now, given that universals have this enormous purchase, we ask ourselves the question, "Can there not be other meta ideas, other ways of living lives?" And given also that universals stem from power, in this case, the power of the West, we also ask, "can there be universals which originated not from the West, but from elsewhere? Now people like Aihwa Ong and Darryl Li have talked about alternative universalizing discourses, but they still remain confined to the here and now. So you see how we're almost entrapped in modernity. If you think about it, pinning our understanding of universals to modernity is equal to saying that all large categories which animate our life today are historically situated particulars that originated from the Enlightenment, and were forcefully globalized or universalized, if you will, through violent conduits such as colonialism. This conception of the human condition, as you can sense, is restrictive, confining, almost terrifying, to think that there is no beyond this. I think that terror that hopelessness is the problem with pinning universals to capitalist modernity. What is ironic for me, though, is that even in a project like ours, where we always seek to escape the here and now. We've been talking about revolutionary and liberating temporalities why do we still have to start with capitalist modernity? Like, what is so enchanting? Like Like what is so amazing or entrapping about modernity that even in attempts to escape it, we remain tied to it?

Atreyee Majumder 18:38

Well, entrapped is perhaps the correct word, Manhar. were crying out loud in agony, as though we're watching some third party being entrapped in an ideological arrangement. Whereas we ourselves, you know, we're watching ourselves like third parties, which is, which is the most terrifying part. But why should we start it start at capitalist modernity? I? My answer to that would be that's the juncture where we're at. This is the dominant lens for understanding social and political phenomena in the late capitalists present, which is, which is freedom and whatever else that goes with it. Why the dominant analytical lens is invested in the present as an absolute is a question I'm particularly keen on asking. Anthropology, I find is particularly oriented towards a long present of the last two or three centuries; anthropology is often unable to conjure an existence which is pinned to a longer axis of time. So this, this orientation towards universals that are ideas that are continuous across times and across historical periods and contexts, is what gives our ongoing conversation some orientation. But of course, we must begin with capitalist modernity I might add, because that's where we're at.

Manhar Bansal 20:02

Well, then if we are to use modernity as a starting point, then let me push you a little further there. Now you mentioned modernity studies scholarship a few moments ago. One of them is Zygmunt Bauman, who in his book Liquid Modernity says, and I quote, "the history of time began with modernity. Indeed, modernity is apart from anything else, perhaps even more than anything else, the history of time. modernity is the time when time has a history," unquote. Now, since our endeavor is precisely to use large swathes of time to travel beyond modernity, how would you respond to this critique? The idea that the very exercise we're seeking to undertake is a product of modern existence. If I can employ Audre Lorde adage, can we use the masters/ tool to break the masters house?

Atreyee Majumder 20:51

The imagination of other times is a modern conceit as Bauman would say, I agree with it, but it is a conceit to imagine that other people are not able to imagine their location and other times the current location, in relation to other times, is perhaps a modern conceit, the human condition has always had a power to conjure expanse. This imaginative capacity of the human condition transcends the immediate confines and look, it is locate once being across wider tapestries. This is where I believe universals are born and rendered and felt and they flourish. A universal category is born out of the way, out of the very human attempt to find categories continuous across time we start with modernity, as a vantage point, you're quite right. With with, with some with some entrapment, we're entrapped in the very categories that we're trying to escape. But, I think universal categories that we're dealing with currently in the world are generated in modernity. Therefore, it's necessary to inquire into the nature of capitalist modernity very deeply before we go any further into this inquiry, this longer inquiry.

Manhar Bansal 22:09

So since we're talking about capitalist modernity, I'll quote another line by Bauman, He says, "that perhaps having killed space's value, time has committed suicide." Now, what are your thoughts on this provocation?

Atreyee Majumder 22:22

Well, that is the dominant narrative, in much of modernity scholarship, especially from the 90s in the early 2000s. Given the scholarships of Bauman, Sassen, Appadurai, and so on, where modernity is considered an primarily an adventure of speed, and that is valid. But yet, I don't think that is a complete picture of modernity, I would side with persons scholars like Elizabeth Povinelli, who uses the term "fixity intense" to show the temporal setback experienced by Indigenous communities in Australia. And I, myself have shown this kind of slowness and experience of life, through modern life, through slowness in my ethnographic work in eastern India on industrial decline and spatial experience. So speed and time-space compression is not the entire picture of modernity.

Manhar Bansal 23:16

Yeah, that's true, I completely agree. Which is why I think that our positionality, as people from the post-colony makes a different, doesn't it? Our experiences of modernity are not the same as that of people in the West, and I think part of our endeavor is to bring to surface these unsaid aspects of modernity, and in doing so go beyond it. But you know, sometimes I wonder, especially as a student, that first person doesn't sit and think about concepts as we do and doesn't record podcasts on a Friday evening. Isn't time sometimes mundane and everyday? It simply passes right like sometimes slowly, short, sometimes fast. It's sometimes mindsets of the past, sometimes of the future, universal similarly are simply inhabited. My question then is, why should a person who simply lives her life, care about this abstract notions of time and universalism? Your own work, as you said, uses the ethnographic method to depict real people and their lives? What do you think is the value of theory, especially critical social theory in anthropology? What is it that theory allows us to do? We often say that it opens up new possibilities; allows us to imagine new worlds. But what do these new possibilities and new worlds look like? And why should we care about them if we cannot reach them?

Atreyee Majumder 24:33

Well, first and foremost, Manhar, I think it would be a mistake to think that people don't think about their own mundane existence. Yes, they might be going about their lives, but they do often consider, you know, philosophical questions. That in fact, that is the font of anthropology that you get to gather traces within the anthropological method of philosophical lives of people who would otherwise never feature in the footnotes of a philosophilcal text. But I do agree with you that even though they might not be thinking a great deal about universals, they might be simply inhabiting them, but they do not simply inhabit them. unthinkingly. Time is a receptacle of universal categories; it gives us a picture of universals, that are radically different from the picture you get, if you only consider our incarceration within the time of the long present--that is a time of capitalist modernity. There are also I might disagree with you too, in this respect, that there are no real people or real things, that are only ways of seeing. Theory gives us a way of seeing, gives us ways of seeing, and this is where I find anthropological attempts at theorizing, the most enriching in the sense that it gives us ways of making sense of the world through a dialectical relationship--although a lot of the times in anthropology we see examples of taking kind of lofty theory from Western social, Western philosophy of social thought, and applying them to a situation in somewhere else in the world, and calling that a certain kinds of knowledge. Of course, one disagrees with that completely. But in in anthropology, there exists a space for dialectical relationships between anthropology, ethnography, and theory. So to frame the question a little bit differently from how you frame it, I would say how and why do we see the marketplace of theory, play out in a mundane view of the world in its all its palaces and bazaars? If that is the question, then we must jostle through the bazaars, not with theory as a secret weapon in our pockets, but to see theory panning out across the whole scene of the busy marketplace. And apologies are due to Walter Benjamin here who's kind of reference to the flaneur and the marketplace, and the boulevard is something that I'm obviously drawing from in this in this conversation.

Manhar Bansal 27:03

Yeah, and jostling through the bazaars, we are. In an attempt to get a hint about how we might think beyond existing universal categories--to engage in theory as bell hooks would say, as a liberatory practice to theorize a toolkit of alternative universals in time--unlike, unlike Darryl Li or Aiwha Ong's alternative discourses, which are valuable, but which continue to exist in the here and now, that after all, is the hook of our project. And a great note to end this podcast on. Would you like to say a few things on what this universals might look like the ones we are searching for before we wind up?

Atreyee Majumder 27:40

Of course, our own imagination of the contours of universals are rather limited at this point. We can only hope for, begin by hoping for a world in which power is not at the center of rule. We live in a world where power is necessarily the only motivation of rule we can even imagine a world where love a universals; we can imagine a world without gender even. So, with that, I think we will close our conversation tonight. Thank you, everyone for listening in. We hope you enjoyed our conversations across many, many axes of universals, especially that of time, universals as ideas that transcend borders, times, histories and contexts continue to excite us and we hope to explore its relationship transfer logical knowledge in greater depth. Thank you for listening.

Anar Parikh 28:54

Thank you for listening to another episode of Anthropological Airwaves. We are grateful to Dr. Atreyee Majumder and Manhar Bansal for bringing their collaboration to Anthropological Airwaves. They wrote, edited, and produced this episode. They have also compiled a short bibliography of texts for those interested in reading further—it is available in the show notes and on the episode page on the American Anthropologist website. This music you hear on this episode is “Air on G String” by Johann Sebastian Bach. The thumbnail image is “Railroad Sunset” by Edward Hopper.

Anar Parikh 29:36

I, Anar Parikh, am the Executive Producer of Anthropological Airwaves and the podcast editor at American Anthropologist. As always, a closed caption version this episode is available on our YouTube channel and a full transcription on the episode page on the American Anthropologist website. Links to both are included in the show notes. wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, don’t forget to rate and review us while you’re there. A five-star review in particular will help other listeners find the show! We are also accepting pitches and would also love to hear from you in general. If you have feedback, recommendations, or an idea for a future episode send an email to amanthpodcast@gmail.com. You can also reach out to us on the American Anthropologist Facebook page or on Twitter where we use the handle @AmAnthJournal. Find links to all of our contact information in the show notes and on the Anthropological Airwaves section of the American Anthropologist website. Take it easy, y’all, and we’ll be back soon with more great anthro audio!

SEAN MALLIN

Season 05 - Episode 01: Who’s Afraid of Universals?

TRANSCRIPT:

Season 05 - Episode 02: What Was Moria and What Comes Next?

Season 04 - Episode 05: Archaeological Identities - Part Three