ABSTRACT
One standard history of Indian anthropology-sociology traces it to administrative productions of knowledge in the form of censuses, gazetteers, and the like, which reduced India, culturally speaking, to a land of caste, kinship, family, and village. Like Westerners, when Indians studied themselves, they called the discipline by which they did it “sociology." Within the international political context of the beginning of the twenty-first century, the chapter looks at some of the different arenas in which anthropological dilemmas of “engagement” are played out. Although the focus is on India, the author believes the situation is sufficiently similar elsewhere to lend the chapter wider relevance. The chapter argues that anthropologists concerned with “relevance” must necessarily perform a balancing act—for instance, while setting “standards” of anthropological excellence in a universe divided by language and experience, or when combining academic research and activist work at a time when activism is no longer confined to the left.
