Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book articulates anthropology and history as disciplines and archives of modernity – in their making and unmaking. It explores the formative connections of historical and anthropological knowledges with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, race and reason, empire and nation, hermeneutic and analytical procedures, and their incessant interplay. The book offers fragments of a historical anthropology of privilege and prerogative, as bound to capital and class as well as gender and alterity – in neoliberal and nationalist times, under plutocratic and populist temporalities. It explores how modern scholasticism and worldly transcendence formidably beget and betoken the cultural privilege of academic arenas, embodied at once in the conceptual conventions as well as their everyday life-worlds.