ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I draw from C. Wright Mill’s understanding of the public and personal, history and biography, to reflect the changing times within which my generation grew up and entered the world of social sciences in the tail end of the 1970s. Times have changed, just as the rapidity of change has changed. Usage of the first person was unheard of in social science writing then. Distant, neutral, and objective was the purported goal of social sciences in general and sociology/social anthropology in particular. This approach began to be increasingly questioned as a series of social movements, such as the feminist, Dalit, and Black movements, brought back questions of locations and knowledge production to the fore. I wish to argue that in this recounting, we tend to miss some crucial bits of history. Matters of locations, partisanship, and the constitutive nature of knowledge were central to Marxism, which was once a very influential political and intellectual challenge to ideas of ‘objectivity’ and ‘value neutrality’. The questions that I raise are, therefore, whether the old critique and the new reflexivity are similar. And if they are not, how are they different? I seek to engage with these questions through my own entry and growth in academia.
