ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses periodization and in marking critical boundaries, it is not based in ethnography, but rather offers a possible reading of certain trends in political anthropology, as an academic practice and subfield, and hence is based in reading in a more direct and literal sense. It argues for a particular account of imagination as a social power that operates through and can only be accessed in mediation. This social imagination operates in a world of shared meanings, draws on symbols that pre-exist any individual appropriation of them, and characteristically relies on compression of large and plural realities into humanly-graspable and thinkable forms. The ideational, ideological, or simply imaginary was, for quite some time, an object of suspicion and critique in the subfield of political anthropology. As Thomas Blom Hansen has commented on Veena Das's similar elaboration of "the ordinary" as a testing ground for the ethical truth of anthropology.
