– no matter who we are or where we are located – are better off with a multiplicity of such contexts.

Different parts and/or ancestor versions of this argument have been presented at seminars in Surajkund (Haryana) and Islamabad.

Satish Deshpande (sdeshpande7@gmail.com) teaches Sociology at Delhi University.

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Must we, in return for the unprecedented possibilities presented by globalisation, agree to forget about the particularities of place? Is there no longer any “there” to location, which has now become solely a matter of identity politics – of the who, what and why rather than the where? Does an ethics of place still make sense today in relation to something as abstract as social theory? Why do taken-for-granted terms like national, local or global now seem unable to anchor a contemporary politics of location? Is there an intellectually meaningful and practically viable sense of location that can maintain a critical distance from both cosmopolitanism and patriotism? These are some of the questions that the following account attempts to address.

1 ‘Location’ Then and Now

The widest, most inclusive (and therefore, least precise) description of the question of “location” would be that it concerns the critique of the universalist claims of postenlightenment western civilisation and the knowledges it has produced. While an older lineage can no doubt be claimed, the most familiar parts of this story belong to the 20th century. A wide variety of movements, intellectual positions and

of Asia at the turn of the century; the “Negritude” movement associated with the names of Leopold Senghor and Aimé Cesaire; a variety of nationalisms that sprouted all over the colonial world from the 1920s and 1930s; the influential writings of Frantz Fanon against racial colonialism; the Bandung Project of mid-century and its various avatars from the non-aligned movement to the advocates of “de-linking”; the 1960s and 1970s convergences and synergies between neo-Marxism, feminism and anti-imperialism. This long list is no doubt incomplete. However, the most recent context for the specific invocation of a politics of location (including the phrase itself) dates from the 1980s, after “poststructuralism” and Foucault. The term is mostly associated with the “women of colour” movement(s) in the United States (US), though various other contemporary projects designed to (directly or indirectly) “provincialise Europe” could also be said to be related.

For the present purpose, however, what is most relevant is the role of geography in these varied conceptions of the politics of location. While spatial considerations were quite central from the beginning, specially in the more overtly nationalistic and third world positions, the 1980s saw the beginnings of change. In what was then an imperceptible – but in retrospect an unmistakable – move, the place of geography began to be diluted in favour of identities of various kinds.

It was a time when the populations of colonial or imperial origin located in the west were coming of age politically. They were, understandably enough, seeking space within the western contexts in which they had grown up. Demanding genuine “multi-culturalism”, they asked why “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack”, to quote the title of one wellknown work. Having graduated out of immigrant status, they were less concerned with the ex-colonised nations that their parents had emigrated from than

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with the ex-coloniser nations that they were now citizens of.

This was also the time when the cumulative effects of ongoing processes of globalisation began to produce their synergistic impact. Everything – ideas, images, people, products, wealth, war, violence, faith – seemed much more visibly mobile and fluid than ever before. As the literature of this period emphasised, mobility was no longer only a prerogative of forces like imperialism or colonialism – there were also “good multinationals” like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Oxfam, etc. The world had been forced to acknowledge the existence of many modernities, not just the dominant western kind. These modernities were not sealed off from each other, but were involved (both willingly and unwillingly) in global processes of communicative exchange.

Moreover, the “west” itself was fast becoming less and less “mono-chromatic”, having to self-consciously acknowledge the long-standing presence of others in its very heartland. Liberal spaces within the west, specially relatively privileged spaces like the university (or, more generally, the intellectual public sphere), came to acquire a more and more cosmopolitan look. So much so that their claim to represent the whole world and all of its varied standpoints began to seem more plausible than it had ever seemed in the modern period. Whatever the political or intellectual issue, and no matter which corner of the globe it happened to emerge in, it always found its way into the western university or its environs. The liberal enclaves of the western public sphere thus became – in a real and important sense – a sort of “universal location”, where every global issue was present in some way. All this made spatial location seem less constitutive and more contextual. Geography was not ignored or suppressed – in fact, geo-awareness had never been more detailed or intense – but was made into a matter of logistics, of acquiring the right people, the right kinds of data and the appropriate means of continual access. To put it simply, location was now a practical rather than a theoretical or ethical issue. Rendered impotent at the level of knowledge p roduction, it was powerless to

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affect the epistemological confidence of the “global west”.

Considered from the side of the nonwest, the advent of globalisation was preceded and accompanied by the steady erosion of the credibility of alternative standpoints anchored in geo-spatial specificities. Thus, nationalism lost its moralpolitical immunity and third world-ism meandered into irrelevance. From the high point of the 1950s symbolised by Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah and Sukarno, third worldist nationalism descended into the manifestly anti-democratic, corrupt, violent and often bizarre world symbolised by Idi Amin or the Peron and Marcos couples. Socialism and communism too were losing their stature rapidly, in a process that began with the excesses of the Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a certain broad sense, therefore, the apparent “uni-polarity” of the world seemed to be a complementary aspect of globalisation and the proliferation of flows and connections.

In terms of social theory itself, the above processes were reflected in the establishment of uncompromisingly “incredulous” attitudes towards “essentialisms” of all kinds. Marxism, feminism, nationalism, liberalism and almost every other “ism” that could have provided an alternative standpoint was rigorously deconstructed. Nothing was “guaranteed” any longer – no location or standpoint was pure or immune to corruption. Among the side effects of all this rigorous debunking was the marginalisation of the spatial dimension of location.

The upshot of this sweeping and sketchy summary is that the problem of location – if such a thing still exists – must now be defined afresh. Older formulations inhabited a different world; too much has changed for them to be still serviceable. In my opinion, the most important changes, arguably also advances, are the following: the need to delink the question of indigeneity from that of location; the imperative to recognise the irreversible changes wrought by globalisation; and, finally, the necessity of acknowledging the non-viability of older spatial standpoints rooted in patriotic particularism as much as cosmopolitan

universalism. These issues are addressed in the subsequent sections.

2 Location vs Indigeneity

It is perhaps understandable that attempts to claim that place matters have generally also felt it necessary to claim a constitutive role for place, and have therefore, gravitated towards arguments for “indigenous” social theory. This is particularly true of anti-colonial nationalisms. As is well known, the colonial dialectic forced the colonised to oscillate between sameness and difference. Successful intellectual resistance to the colonial master necessarily involved producing theory that was as good as (therefore comparable) but at the same time different from (therefore acquitted of the charge of mere mimicry) the master’s theories. Sometimes an added spin was imparted by the invocation of authenticity and an almost religious sense of rootedness in a sacralised geo-spatial location, the motherland or homeland. Extreme versions (such as the Chinese one) also involved an explicit attempt at strict autarky with foreign influences being rigidly excluded.

Without providing a full justification, let me simply assert here that, today, none of this is viable or necessary. As we have learnt in the sphere of the economy, autonomy need not imply autarky. Indeed, one could say that intellectual autarky is even less feasible today than economic autarky. This is not to say that theories are now somehow freed of all accountability to context, as though they now magically fit any and every context. But the problems arising out of possible mismatches between theory and context are not necessarily due to the “foreigness” of the theory, and “native” theories are not necessarily immune to such problems. In other words, accountability to context does not require pure indigeneity, and, conversely, a purely local theory may not necessarily be the best to address the particularities of place.

Perhaps the lessons learnt in the past decades can be summarised in the proposition that there is no necessary relationship between the usefulness of a theory and its origins. Where a t heory is born or developed need have little implication for its usefulness or effectivity. The two questions need to be addressed separately. Problems or dissatisfactions with theory need to be described clearly and accurately; the pedigree of these theories is not specially relevant for such descriptions. One may subsequently discover or argue that this or that shortcoming of the theory arises from the conditions of its birth

– but that is a different matter. Conversely, the biography of a theory offers no clue as to when, where or how it may prove to be useful. Consequently, arguing for a politics of location in relation to social theory does not require us to argue for indigenous (native born or “local”) theories as such.

Today, it is possible to go much further than this. One could in fact argue that even if it were required, the argument for an indigenous theory has now become much harder to produce. Two obvious obstacles are the instability of common reference cate gories, and the question of degrees of indigeneity (or foreignness).

What is an indigenous theory? How can one be recognised? The matter of identifying marks gains importance in the context of the demand for distinctiveness that indigeneity normally entails. Because of this, whatever is required – or claimed – to be authentically indigenous (e g: theories, religions, women, customs, etc) must display legible and lavish signs of both difference (from the “other”) and belonging (to the “self”). This raises the general issue of the reference categories of indigeneity – indigenous to what? With respect to what unit is/ should indigeneity be defined? A common move is to require that an indigenous theory/ concept, etc, show some connection with the “tradition” – i e, the past – of a spatiocultural entity of some sort, like a nation state, cultural region or civilisational area.

Of course, this is all perfectly normal at one level, and there is nothing necessarily good or bad about such reference units. Except that they tend to be treated as selfevident and eternal categories, which they are not. The taken-for-granted character of its reference categories makes indigenism vulnerable to unresolvable dilemmas and tensions. Indigenist arguments therefore need to subject their reference categories to rigorous examination, including periodic re-examination. But they are often unwilling or unable to do this, and thus fail to remain alert to changes in the conditions that grant legitimacy and social force to a particular reference category and enable it to support a meaningful notion of indigeneity.

For example, although fidelity to the tradition, culture and history of a particular nation state or cultural region is commonly insisted upon by indigenists, it is usually fidelity to a particular version or subset of tradition that is actually demanded. Because it is rare for traditions or cultures to be entirely homogeneous or unitary, problems arise when different components of the culture or different segments of the past are treated differently – what is indigenous for you becomes alien for me and vice versa, with no way out of the deadlock.

A similar difficulty is created by an allor-nothing attitude towards the question of indigeneity. At a general level, indigenist arguments are not only overly concerned with things like birthplaces, origins, authenticity and purity, they also adopt an either-or approach to these questions. In other words, they are hostile to degrees and gradations – either something is indigenous or it is not, it cannot be allowed to be partially indigenous, more or less indigenous. Thus, indigenist arguments are impervious to history, that is, to the sheer malleability of human beings and their capacity for change over time.

The English language is an obvious example. There is a non-trivial, even important, sense in which English in the 21st century is also a south Asian language. It certainly belongs here now – even if it does not belong to everyone here; even if this is not the only place to which it belongs; and even if there was a time, still within living memory, when it did not belong here. But the d iehard indigenist would collapse belonging into birth and insist that English is not indigenous to south Asia. Of course, she or he would be right in a certain sense, but one that is no longer compelling. This does not mean that English is indistinguishable from other south Asian languages. But the many problems and issues associated with it (specially those of unequal access) are not due solely or even mainly to its being a “foreign” language. Conversely, these (or analogous) problems are not absent in other south Asian languages by virtue of their native status.

Despite all these problems, it is not my case that there is nothing salvageable in the notion of indigeneity. To recover what is valuable and relevant about the elusive search for indigeneity, one has to return to the affective revolt against the reality or

prospect of domination that triggers this search. Thus, in its most progressive form, the desire for an indigenous social theory is the desire to claim full autonomy and sovereignty in a context where they are denied or absent. There is nothing obsolete or anachronistic about this desire because, however much the world may have changed, power, domination, inequality and injustice are still very much around.

On the other hand, the world has changed enough that we need not, and cannot, subscribe to the older, narrower notions of indigeneity. But if a contemporary politics of location is not about native origins, then what is it about? Where, in what specific aspects of the globalised present, are our anxieties about place located? Before trying to answer these questions it may be useful to summarise the many implicit and explicit reasons why the “globalist” paradigm is unsympathetic or even hostile to geographically specific conceptions of location.

3 Arguments for Discounting Location

In the globalised 21st century, when dispersed manufacturing, free trade and a borderless world are the buzz words, it seems perverse to be worrying about where something is produced. If almost everything can and is being outsourced, or is being produced “globally”, what is the harm in doing the same with social theory? Thus, even before we can ask the question of its possibility, contemporary wisdom prompts us to question the very necessity or desirability of social theory being produced in places like south Asia. The most common arguments in this line of reasoning are following.1

Specificity of the Social Sciences: Unlike military or industrial-scientific research, social scientific research need not, and in fact, cannot really be kept secret. Besides, its production costs are relatively low, and (from the producer’s point of view) sharing it does not involve zero-sum logic – i e, distributing it will not only not reduce the producer’s share, it may also generate beneficial synergies. So, there is every reason to believe that social scientific knowledge – even when its production is monopolised by a particular group or region – will still get disseminated widely without any major problems.

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Ease of Communication: With the revolution in global telecommunications, accessing knowledge of all kinds and specially the low-security, low-cost knowledge of the social science variety has never been easier. So, as long as we can access and use social theory without restrictions, we need not worry about where this social theory is produced, just as we do not worry about where our TV set or telephone was invented or produced.

Unspecifiability of Claims: Can we really specify precisely what is “western” about social theory that happens to have been produced in the west? And even if we can, does its alleged western-ness make it any less “ours”? Is it any less effective or valid? Does our relationship to it change in any significant way? Most arguments against so-called western theory are unable to demonstrate that the problems or failures they cite are due specifically to the western-ness of the theory rather than just bad theory or improper use of theory. Theories are just good or bad, not w estern, or racist or sexist. Good theories when applied well will work; bad theories will not.

Economies of Scale: Contrary to popular belief, and despite its low-tech nature, the production of social-scientific knowledge has reached a stage where the investment involved in terms of human and material capital is enormous. The economies of scale are such that most nations (or even regions) cannot expect to produce social theory, just as most nations cannot expect to produce nuclear reactors or pharmaceuticals or an entire automobile. After all, what is so sacrosanct about the nation state – or even a multination region – as a social unit that we must seek to make it intellectually viable? Have not we gained by world trade and dispersal and/or concentration of production in other spheres? Why assume that we will not when it comes to intellectual production? Autarky has long been unviable and unnecessary in the contemporary world system.

Diversity of Producers: It is unreasonable to fetishise geo graphy, race or ethnicity in the production of social scientific knowledge when the producers of this knowledge are more mixed and multicultural today than ever before in human history.

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The composition of the global intellectual elite has never been as diverse in terms of ethnic, racial or national-regional identities as it is today. The western university may indeed be located in the west, but it is the closest thing to the proverbial global village in today’s world, and a relatively egalitarian one too. The whole world is represented there, and so are “we”.

In addition to these arguments against taking location too seriously, which come from perspectives that are optimistic about globalisation, there are also some that come from positions that are critical of globalisation. The most important of the latter kind of argument derives from the hard lesson learnt by proponents of standpoint theories of various sorts. This lesson, simply put, is that a standpoint or identity does not come with any guarantees. Native-born theorists can turn out to be the most effective a pologists for colonialism; empowered women can be efficient fascists, as good or better than men; and workers can be fanatically committed to capitalist ideologies. It is not that standpoints do not provide special insights; it is that these insights are present only as possibilities – there is nothing inevitable or automatic about them.

Thus arguments for location today must be positive ones; they cannot hope to criticise location-neutral practices and rest their case. It is necessary to state clearly the specific goods or benefits that are expected to flow from located intellectual projects or activities.

4 Contemporary Locations

In order to appreciate the impact of these broad developments, one could turn to the specific case of the cultural sciences. In the context of this discussion, the most relevant aspect of the specificity of the social science disciplines is that they all require (albeit to different degrees) detailed familiarity with the functioning of parti cular societies. This dependence on detailed access to the everyday life in which culture or society is embedded and manifested changes the relationship between the western and non-western academies. There is a sense in which scholars who happen to be natives of the society being studied can claim privileged access to the raw materials out of which social scientific

knowledge is fashioned. However, as with most other raw materials, mere access is nothing; what is decisive is access to the resources with which to “add value” to this raw material by transforming it into finished products that can command a high price in the academic marketplace. Since the global academic market – even for knowledge about non-western societies – is dominated by the west, this in effect shifts the advantage back to scholars based in western societies, who not only command far superior material resources, but also have privileged access to the tastes and preferences of the market. Even in this scheme of things, bilingual and bicultural scholars (those with “native” access to nonwestern cultures as well as “insider” access to the western institutions which control the academic market) have been able to carve out a special niche for themselves.

Of course, this is a greatly simplified and selective sketch of the structure of the global academy, but even at this level it is clear that, in the contemporary era, the “bicultural niche” mentioned above has been fragmented and now has many variants. In the era of globalisation, “location” (in the sense of positioning within a particular social, geopolitical, and institutional milieu) is no longer limited to one or two discrete positions. There is now a continuum linking the older extremes of non-western scholars living and working in non-western contexts on the one hand, and western scholars living and working in western contexts on the other. For example, there are now scholars born, brought up and trained in south Asia who have moved to the west; there are first or second generation western-born scholars of south Asian origin located in the west; and there are both south Asian and western scholars who divide their time between south Asian and western academic institutions. So the claim to privileged access to “ culture” cannot be made in a simple fashion any more. Moreover, access to communities is no longer as strictly confined by geography as it used to be – diasporic versions of most communities may now be found all over the world; and contemporary modes of communication now provide detailed access to many aspects of the daily life of a community from remote locations thousands of kilometres away. Thus, even though “native” status was never a guarantee of any special empathy or insight, it is nevertheless true that, today, implicit or explicit claims to privileged access are much more difficult to sustain.

The discontinuity between the agnostic mood of the globalised present and the fervent beliefs of the (now bygone) era of political radicalism is the reason why the location question seems full of ambiguities today. In many of the older debates on indigenous theory, the institution of social science was itself left somewhat opaque. It was as though the task was one of inventing – wholesale and all at once – an entire worldview ex nihilo, i e, from the beginning and out of nothing other than purely indigenous sources. Even if mostly by default, “social science” itself was thought of as a thing, a product of some sort. In the cruder versions, it had the air of a “me too” enterprise – just as all nations have passports and postage stamps, so too must they have a social science of their own.

In the contemporary world, we can hardly avoid noticing that “doing social science” is a process, not a product. As such, it involves, above all, a community of interlocutors. It is, in constant, a critical interaction with such a community that something called “social science” gets produced, almost as a by-product. It is, moreover, an incremental thing. The days when the proverbial Weberian virtuoso created an entire worldview more or less singlehandedly are now long past. Though it may seem to retain some of the features of artisanal production that it once had, the making of social theory now is an increasingly institutionalised enterprise. It needs the full spectrum of intellectual activity to sustain it, with the attendant institutional and organisational set-up. This includes not only the entire edifice of higher education, from graduate education to the doctoral level, but also the research establishment across the spectrum from the most applied to the most basic. But more than the material aspects of this set-up – which are critically important – it is the intellectual aspects that prove decisive. Some of these are products of accident, others are not. What is required is a community that one is interpellated by, and to which one feels (and is held) accountable. This community must be sufficiently autonomous that it is able to set its own agendas, but is confident enough not to cut itself off from other such communities in the fear of being influenced by them. Finally, if all the above is somehow assured, this community must also have a clear and strong vision of the stakes involved, a shared sense of why their collective enterprise matters.

So, in brief, when we speak of being able to do social theory, we are really talking about all this. Theory is thus a sort of label or metaphor for all of the above. Moreover, it need not always manifest itself in grand form – it could consist of quite small, incremental changes or shifts. What it promises is the reflexive ability to think about the use of conceptual tools – the ability to metatheoretically critique them, repair or tweak them, including the ability to re-invent them if necessary. It really means the ability to “own” theory (regardless of its origins) and make it do one’s own bidding – this subsumes not only the confidence to borrow from others, but also the indefinable “nerve” to either invent or tinker as required.

The central issue faced by a politics of location today is the massive fact that this kind of an intellectual community is becoming more and more unviable in more and more parts of the world. How and why is this happening, and what sorts of reponses could one offer? Answering these questions is made more difficult by the fact that the old notion of the nation state

– the kind that formed the basis for nationalisms and even some socialisms – is no longer an acceptable alternative.

5 Necessity of Postnational Perspectives

For a contemporary politics of location, thinking beyond the nation state has now become a matter not just of possibility or desirability but of necessity. This is because of three broad sets of reasons that are somewhat different from those that are commonly offered to account for the alleged obsolescence of nation states in the era of globalisation.

First, the nation-form and its hitherto taken-for-granted political legitimacy have suffered significant internal damage. This is different from the globalisation-induced erosion of faith in the inevitability of the nation-form as an administrative-political unit for national and international governance. Every nationalist movement, in the

name of unity and the exigencies of the fight against imperialism, has suppressed minorities of various sorts. The nation states that are created out of these movements inherit the effects of these suppressions and continue to treat parts of their own nation as internal colonies. Even if an outright repression is not resorted to, there are systematic inequalities and exclusions being practised with various regional or minority groups being marginalised. A politics of location can no longer assume the innocence of nation states, or insist upon ignoring intra-national relations of power and dominance. While nations and specially states can hardly be wished away even in this globalised era, alternative conceptions of location will have to allow for the fact that international interventions are often an effective counter to the excesses of state power.

Second, most individual nation states may simply be too small, too poor, or otherwise unable to nurture the quantum and level of “full spectrum” intellectual activity required to sustain a viable location (Section 4 above). Even if we take a very broad view of intellectual activity to include all its formal and non-formal avatars, it remains an elitist activity in every society. Even in the most affluent and enlightened societies, professional or full-time involvement in intellectual pursuits is a luxury available to a relatively small group. Moreover, in many of the smaller nation states, the cumulative effects of a colonial past and a globalised present may have irretrievably damaged the higher education system that forms the catchment area for intellectual work. There are, therefore, good arguments for thinking of locations as sites or contexts with a supra-national regional dimension.

Third, thinking in more-than-national terms (or other-than-national) is necessary in order to counter the strong but asymmetrical relationships that usually persist between metropolitan (ex-coloniser) and peripheral or semi-peripheral (ex-colonised) nations. It is true that such relationships have come in for scrutiny in recent times, both from scholars located in the west as well as those in the non-west. However, despite the greater sensitivity to questions of equity and reciprocity in academic-intellectual interactions, the basic contours of asymmetry remain largely unchanged. This

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persistence is underwritten by the material conditions of intellectual production in both metropolitan and peripheral contexts and is therefore not easy to interrupt. However, the point is that attempts to transcend this situation cannot be viewed in purely bilateral terms – they must involve a more inclusive framework which precludes any simple recourse to nationalist positions. Earlier attempts to resist intellectual domination have got mired in questions of nationalism and indigeneity, and one way of avoiding a return to those dead ends is to think in non-nationalist terms.

The above arguments by no means imply the “death” of the nation state. Nations and particularly states will continue to be major actors on the world stage well into the foreseeable future. This is true for the organisation and sustenance of intellectual activity as well, specially in less affluent countries where the state is often the only investor in higher education. In fact, this is the major justification for the term “postnational” rather than some other word altogether. By the same logic commonly invoked to justify terms like postcolonial, the term postnational indicates that the effects of the nation continue to be felt even though it no longer defines the current horizon of possibilities.

6 Speculative Conclusions

The preceding account has tried to map a route – through old predicaments like the reactive search for indigeneity, and new anxieties about the splintered and guaranteeless status of once almighty standpoints – to the concrete conditions and challenges facing a contemporary politics of location. It may be useful to reiterate once again what a politics of location cannot be today.

A politics of location is not about authenticity, indigeneity or other kinds of claims that assert a superior relationship to a specific subject of study by virtue of belonging or proximity. No assurances can be given today about insiders – whether natives, citizens, residents and so on – being able to produce better know ledge about the societies they are part of. In this sense, an address is no guarantee of anything – it need not even tell us where a person spends most of their time, or how – and whether – they relate to their surrounding milieu. This is true even when the address

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in question is a genuine and permanent one – it is possible to live one’s entire life in a social world and yet not be of it. In any case, the ambition to produce – rather than simply consume – social theory is surely much more than the desire to understand what exists in the immediate vicinity.

By extension, the politics of location is not a project of import substitution or intellectual autarky. Multiple locations in different parts of the world are not needed merely to produce local theory, or keep out pernicious foreign influences. In fact, a confident intellectual tradition will welcome the opportunity of learning from “imported” theories, or of “exporting” its own theories. To put it bluntly, this is not a claim that western or west-located theory is somehow bad or inferior, while theory produced in the politically correct locales of the non-west is somehow good or superior.

The politics of location does involve the desire to interrupt relations of intellectual and institutional domination and dependence between western and non-western (as well as within each of these) contexts. It also engenders the hope of fuller, more meaningful forms of accountability to one’s context, but this is by no means an automatic or natural outcome. Finally, the politics of location also involves the desire to draw in newer and more v aried audiences, to create more inclusive publics that will form the universe of discourse for social theory.

But most of all the politics of location is about the “social footprint” of intellectual activity. Despite the enormous changes brought about by the communications revolution, it is still true that most people and most contexts are not really mobile or globally connected – they remain embedded within their social and geopolitical environments. If full spectrum intellectual activity becomes increasingly centralised and concentrated – as it seems to be becoming – then most of the world’s theory will be deve loped from a very small number of “universal” locations. This provincialisation of thought cannot be good for our collective future, and would be specially damaging for these universal locations themselves. This is because the universal location will end up denying itself the heuristic advantage of an outside perspective. While it is true that such outsider perspectives exist today, the paradoxical fact is that as soon as

their worth is realised they begin to be domesticated, and end up as “resident aliens” living in the universal location. This ensures that, eventually, there is no real “outside” left. It is crucially important that every location have an “outside” because every location only offers a partial vision. The inevitable blind spots can only be made visible and corrected from a different standpoint.

Is not this an alarmist and exaggerated doomsday vision? After all, are not there hundreds of universities and thousands of intellectuals living outside the west? It may certainly seem so if one ignores the distinction between producing knowledge or research, and producing researchers. The generative ability to train and inspire those who will produce knowledge is fast d isappearing from large parts of the globe. While research activity continues to exist in such places, the training and higher order functions have long since ceased to be viable.2 The fact is that, in intellectual terms, most non-western contexts are now the locations of final consumption or sites for raw material extraction. The few viable sites outside the west are in a transitory limbo, unsure of what the apparently inevitable effects of globalisation have in store for them.

The cumulative effect of these changes is visible in the fact that even the most progressive west-located intellectuals find it hard to see or acknowledge their geospatial location once it acquires universalist status. This is particularly true of the US today, the sole superpower in a newly unipolar world. Living in this universal location – the place that is represented everywhere as representing everyone – one’s own location becomes a practical rather than a political matter. Since every good thing can also be done from this location, often with more efficiency and effect, what one is doing becomes more important than where one’s doings are located. Consequently, the universalist location is seen, at best, as an enabling site for good works, or at worst, becomes fully transparent and hence invisible.

It is difficult, but surely not impossible, to clearly identify the standpoint from which a contemporary politics of location must be articulated today. This vantage point is necessarily opposed to the essentialisms of yesterday, but refuses to equate this opposition with an indifference to place. Location matters not because some places are superior or inferior to other places but because places differ. This difference does not require to be celebrated or museumised or protected from contamination – it merely needs to be allowed to survive. If social theory is indeed partially shaped by its contexts, then surely we would be better off with more

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rather than fewer such contexts. And this would hold true for every possible “we”, no matter what its composition or, for that matter, its location.

How, then, do we respond to the fact that everything in the present and foreseeable future seems to be working towards n arrowing the number and nature of contexts from which the full spectrum intellectual activity remains viable?

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Notes

1 Just to clarify things – the views and arguments summarised in this section are not mine – they are merely the most common ones in circulation today.

2 See Deshpande (2006) for a preliminary description of the concrete dimensions of this predicament for the social sciences in south Asia.

Reference

Deshpande, Satish (2006): “Can There Be a South Asian Social Science? A View from Indian Sociology”, paper presented at the South Asian Policy Analysis Network, Conference on “Envisioning South Asia”, Islamabad, 29-30 April.

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