Reinventing India: liberalization, Hindu nationalism and popular democracy, by Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss (Polity Press, 2000, pp. xx+313, £16.99 pbk, £50.00 hbk)

✍ Scribed by Indraneel Dasgupta

• Book ID: 102350852
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 41 KB
• Volume: 14
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.851

✦ Synopsis

scientists, and, with their focus on a few prominent works written in the 1980s and early 1990s, show only a superficial acquaintance with the wider and later non-anthropological literatures. Those of us with an interest in the changing 'international development' scene would find a book on politics in the post Cold War, 'information age' era, produced out of a constructive dialogue between anthropology, sociology, political science (and economics) much more helpful.

The book is full of examples of the potential contribution of anthropology to such an enterprise. Only a few can be highlighted here. In Chapter 2 (The origins and limits of coercive power: the anthropology of stateless societies) Gledhill emphasizes the importance of thinking about societies as components in wider regional systems whose histories and structures are inter-dependent, which is particularly relevant for understanding Africa's societies, polities, cultures and economies. In Chapter 4 (The political anthropology of colonialism: a study of domination and resistance) a discussion of resistance in the colonial context discusses the problem that what appears at one level to be resistance frequently seems ultimately to reproduce 'categorical and institutional structures of domination' (p. 67). In Chapter 7 on 'political process and global disorder', where Gledhill again seems a bit out of his depth when discussing the big structures, there is a useful comparison of studies of Peru, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, countries with 'peculiar internal cultural logics' which have allowed global social processes with 'similar consequences throughout the world' to trigger extreme violence in these particular cases. These logics are characterized by processes of 'internal fractionalization' which prevent conflict resolution. Chapter 8 describes some of the diversity in the 'new social movements' in Latin America; of particular relevance to current development discourse are the empirical findings that these movements do not give a universal meaning to the concept of 'rights', and that in different contexts the political construction of ethnicity takes different forms.

This is a book written in a 'thick description' style which non-anthropologists will find hard to digest. Those who know more than Gledhill seems to about the 'non-anthropological' approaches he criticizes are likely to feel that their disciplines are being misrepresented. While he demonstrates that Western intellectual 'ethnocentrism' is problematic (but 'transcendable' by Western universitybased academics?) and fieldwork can be extremely enlightening, he does it using a rhetoric that is not kind to non-anthropologists, providing them with intellectual and emotional excuses not to listen. The peculiar 'internal cultural logic' of social science approaches to the non-West in the current global economic and political context entails processes of internal fractionalization which promote and support inter-disciplinary distance and conflict. Unfortunately there are few incentives to choose the difficult, but potentially more intellectually (and pragmatically) efficient, productive, and exciting route of inter-disciplinary respect, dialogue and negotiation.