Thank you, Zubia, it's a great pleasure and honour to be speaking in this particular forum.
As you know, I was quite reluctant or hesitant because I was really hesitant to talk to a
community of historians since I'm not a historian in any measure of the term.
But I was encouraged by the fact that you were open to looking at questions around the
theme of history from different disciplines so foolishly or bravely jumped into this.
And let's see the end of it. How foolish I have been.
I want to take this opportunity to talk about some work that I've been doing for quite some time on
trying to understand the nature of society and in particular the work and my with my collaborator,
plus a global guru with whom we have written two books on this particular topic.
Let me try and related to the question of history, which is always at the back of the book,
which we now in all our thinking about the idea of the social and society, although we did not focus particularly on the concept of history,
what struck us was that in all our engagement with so many communities around the country under different points of time,
there was always an incipient historical consciousness present in people, and that is nothing new.
But what was interesting is the way in which this historical consciousness shaped their social imagination.
So I'm going to speak just on that specific topic here.
I know there's been a huge amount of work in history dealing with the relationship
with larger questions of sociology and history and of accounts of ordinary people.
But I want to use that term to really engage with this question of our history,
a term which repeatedly vowed contact we repeatedly encounter today when I talk
to communities and individuals in their invocation of an idea of our history,
something that belongs to them. So then I want to ask the question, what is this history that they think belongs to them?
What is the sense of belongingness that one develops with the idea of history?
So it's going to be a very satiric kind of reflection on this.
But I welcome kind of critical comments and suggestions at the end of my talk.
So it's it's a long paper, but I'm not gonna read the paper in full,
but I'm going to try and highlight some of the points which is presented in this particular paper.
So let me begin with. Are we trying to make sense of this idea of our history?
So in this talk, I'll attempt to make sense of a phenomenon that I see all the time and across the country,
which is the way common people conceptualise and articulate their sense and experience of history.
What I mean by that account of history about themselves and their communities is
not history that is validated according to the tenets of history as a discipline.
Nevertheless, it is a sense of history in that it deals primarily with the past, with accounts of events,
with chronology and other elements that are also of interest to the discipline of history.
Whenever such self accounts of history conflict with the professional historian, they they're often dismissed.
Interestingly, both sides of the of the debate in the debate dismiss each other's history as we know well,
has become a primary site of contention in public discourse. And that's particularly dangerous political consequences in the India of today.
However, my aim and what I want to speak today is not to engage in this political debate, which I'm sure most of you are already well versed with,
but to understand the implications of the self accounts of history for a philosophy of history.
So what little confidence I would have to speak about this is going to be around the ideal of philosophy of history,
certain philosophical questions around this thing, this activity called history.
I'm also convinced that such an explanation is absolutely essential when we engage
in South Asian cultures and perhaps other contiguous cultures in Asia and Africa.
I do find it problematic that intellectual practises from these cultures do not
become part of the theoretical and philosophical discussions about history.
How much of the historical reflection on South Asia actually draws upon the conceptual categories of
the many traditions ranging from the mainstream to the subaltern in order to understand the processes,
the conceptual foundations and the philosophies of their own histories?
How is it possible to understand the enormous production of work on conceptual foundations
of history with comparatively insignificant philosophical and conceptual basis?
Non Western traditions, what are the challenges such a view raises for the discipline of history itself?
Gopal Guru, my colleague and my collaborator now work was also there with us today,
famously used a phrase to call them theoretical Brahmins and empirical should shooters in order to highlight the problem of
reducing the Dalitz to pure empirical subjects who did not have the capacity to theorise about their own lives in the same way.
One can ask whether most parts of Asia and Africa continue to remain purely empirical subjects who do not
have the capacity or the vocabulary to produce theoretical reflection to diminish their own condition,
if not their own condition, if not that of others in the West. While I will not deal with this debate directly,
this theme hovers in the background of my talk as I will explore the absence of drawing upon lived
experiences of histories from communities in India in a global philosophical reflections on history.
Many of the articulations that describe the various communities and groups in India have a self description of the histories of themselves.
It is a history that is often articulated as our history, their history, which they identify with,
and the history that causally influences how they perceive the present and act towards the future.
It's producing narratives. Every caste produces caste narratives of this kind.
It is part of everyday talk of various religious sects. It's integral to the identities which different groups form politically and socially.
This history is replete with events, with personalities, with chronologies of what happen when and to whom.
It's also closely related to the everyday practise. And it's not just an intellectual position which they take very often.
They differ from the history of the historians.
One common difference, of course, is that correct date of events and the time in which somebody lived and many times other histories.
And I'm going to keep using the word histories and I I'm going I'm writing it.
I put our in quotes, but just when I'm speaking, whenever I invoke our histories,
I'm not talking about art in the sense of I belong in my belongingness to history.
But this category called histories, people's history and history, which creates a sense of belongingness within communities.
So we know that many of these are histories that exaggerated sense of time frames.
However, I have often found it impossible to try and engage them in a critique of them that this idea of numbers for time,
for example, or reducing number to timeline's.
This is a point which is worth discussing in great detail, since it connects to the ontology of time to that of mathematics.
But I shall not do that. There is also a mismatch of vocabulary since the description of our history invokes
concepts that do not occur in the modernised academy discourse of history.
So my focus on this talk is not whether these accounts should be seen as
historical or whether they should be located in the domains of myth and fiction,
or as is increasingly been involved in the domain of political ideologies.
I'm more interested in the process of this particular sociality,
this particular process of a group of people coming together as a group by invoking the idea of history.
There are two major themes in this formation of our histories.
First, we recognise that the group formation always seems to produce our histories as, as I just explained,
put on writing of communities, continuing everyday practise as it was practised hundreds of years ago,
etc. in a part of it is also to represent the past with more what I call a force of presence, making the past, quote unquote, more present.
This leads us to enquire into the relation between the histories and the formation of the social group around these histories.
What is it about history that characterises this coming together that provokes an ideal venus',
that makes them articulate what they see as art history?
What is it about social formation that makes it seem as if historical accounts are essential to the formation of a social equivalently,
given the close connexion between the historical and social? How do we talk about the sociality of history?
Like we would talk about social realities of various group formation like that, of course, class, gender and religion.
On the other hand, we also recognise that the social needs, history, historical narratives, historical ontologies.
So the first part of my thought will try and address some of these concerns.
Secondly, one of the striking features of our history is its hyper reality and its a hyper reality of the past.
In our histories, the past becomes far more real and present than when it is filtered through the goals and aims of academic history.
This hyper reality of the past makes artefacts and people of the past take on a greater than real presence in today's world.
This presents as causal influences in the contemporary solution.
As we see in the politics of today, it has a significant effect on individuals and families.
Many times in the day to day lives, what interests me about this hyper realism are insights into the ontology of history,
particularly the ontological status of the past.
In particular, this ontology of the past, exemplified in our histories, showed a deep and intriguing relation with Dutch,
maybe asking us to take more seriously the phenomenological experience of touching the past and touching history,
the complexity of touch as a deep relationship to the structures of Indian society.
And we can draw upon this to understand the everyday possibility of touching the past.
That is a common sense of touching objects of history in our daily lives.
People's descriptions of individual and community histories often talk about
historical terms and historical artefact as if they are sensorially accessible.
History arises in this domain, not as a set of intangible facts on knowledge claims,
but as a sensorium that is most dominantly influenced by the sense of touch.
To understand this, we have to, of course, start with the assumption that what sets societies apart is that metaphysics,
the cultural philosophies that underlies the beliefs and practises, and it is not us, it is not an accident.
And surprising that that's such an important role here,
because one of the most important complex metaphysical category that underlies Indian experiences is the concept of touch,
a theme which should be explored in great detail and myself in our first DiCamillo.
So the formation of self knowledgeable communities is not special to history.
Lay descriptions of social phenomena also show similar practises. The way people talk about religion and caste, for example,
can be quite different from the approach and disciplines such as religious studies or sociology.
People's self understanding of caste very often as completely different narratives.
The sociological descriptions in it is.
It is true that as laypeople we do not possess the expert knowledge and you can look at analogies in various dimensions.
But the the the passing point I want to make it is that history too is like this.
Historians have expert knowledge, but the products of history,
the experience of historical processes and the use of our history in our daily lives is similar to what we do in the other domains.
And I think it's a term which I would like to use just in passing.
It's not substantially anything, which I'm going to say is is what I would call as jugaad history in a very famous term in the Indian context,
which if you want to find of structuralist, which is very useful,
very popular in the post constructiveness to disclose is Bacolod history as a collage.
And the Jugaad history, which characterises what we see as many aspects of the doing within Indian societies,
suggest that history is also done in this particular way. So a lot of it and the reason why I want to set the problem of this is because
a lot of it goes back to a fundamental question in the philosophy of history,
which is the problematic claim about the ontologies of history,
what kind of objects entities that history talks about and what kind of commitment, what kind of ontological commitment do you want to make?
Two terms that are talked about in history that are the objects of discourse in history.
What kind of ontologically come in.
So let me introduce this as a as the way in which I want to understand this particular relationship between the historical and sociological.
So the question of history in the writings of history, such as social history, cultural history,
subaltern history has been a point of contention, as I'm sure all of you know very well in the context of articulations of our history.
This question is really the crux of the problem. And the question is what is the history in our history?
You could like the question was for us, what is the history and social history, for example?
There is no easy answer, primarily because the definition of history has become so fractured into so many types of histories.
In particular, the confusion regarding history and social history leads to questions about the goals, methods, as well as a matter of history.
As Gertrude Himelfarb in the paper in the American Historical Review notes,
the proliferation of the varieties of new history has led to basic questions on the historical nature of these histories.
She agrees with suggestions that Cold War history has to be put into social history and
called a crucial lack in these new histories was the lack of what she calls central themes,
frameworks and significant questions. One of the points of recovery of traditional ideas of history in the face of these new history,
including deconstruction of history, is to go back to certain foundational themes in history.
Himelfarb points out that historians of different colours have gladly disputed the reality of historical past.
So this phrase that she uses to counter the really disparate reality of the
historical historical past becomes the core element which one can hold on to.
Even in the past, as a matter of dispute of imperfect description, that nevertheless there is a task of history,
was a serious engagement with the past and attempts to respond to these imperfections.
But she argues the new historians make the past, quote, more indeterminate, more elusive,
less real than it has ever been, and could lead to new possibilities of history.
So the notion of history that I'm using here is not really about these questions of new histories.
It's a history of groups that claim a sense of history as an essential part of the social realities.
Interestingly, semantic structure is not very different from the themes of traditional history.
In particular, the notion of the past is extremely important in this, and it is not the past that is,
to use the words of Himelfarb, more indeterminate, more elusive, less severe.
But in contrast is a past that is hyper determinate. Absolutely.
And graspable concrete ontology that underlies our history is actually a more robust
version of the ontology that characterises traditional historical questions.
But where there is significant difference, the methods and the uses to which this ontology is put,
and I find a very useful way to enter into this discussion and to lead it into the questions which I'm posing for.
Trying to make sense of history in the South Asian context of the Indian context is through paper,
which I find very useful by a British historian, Michael Bently, a British historian.
Michael Bently newspaper Boston Presents Revisiting Historical Ontology Publishing
Entity points out that the developments in history over the last 30 years
and he's writing this in it's published in 2006 that the development of this
for the past 30 years has moved away attention from the nature of the past,
which has become diffused and subject to what he calls imagination is the victim.
He also isolates a particular reason that of the specialisation of time, which he believes.
I think computer. Yeah, I we can't seem to hear you.
The pain of the past is never present, but neither is it an absence,
and the basic thrust of his argument is that the past, present and future are intertwined, intertwined.
And he uses the term prototype to describe,
to call them conceptual enlightenment that governs the modes and code by which this intervention is conceived.
So basically, he is trying to find a way which moves away from ideas that past is is a fictionalised creation.
It is idealistic or the kind of a mental creation or that it is even more passive in nature.
So while Bill Bentley agrees that as historians, it was important to be critical of the notion that, quote, a bit of the past is still in the present.
And he also argues that at the same time, it's important to not ignore the ontology of the past in all its complexity.
Instead, he says,
scientific modernism became the guiding principle for history in the early parts of the 20th century and post 1970s into the post-war activism.
Bentley notes that with the work of Bot's Fugo and Hadyn Way White,
although they had important things to say about epistemology they took away, took the past of it altogether, end quote.
And this yota perceptively notes that this movement banished, in his words,
banish the past into nothingness with no power to affect its futures and and therefore
leads to a focus on questions of memory and narratives which become privileged.
The problem has been, rightly points out, is not about the past or the reality of time, but of the lack of engagement of more complex ontologies.
Much of the rejection of the past was based on naive realism of the past and time and the nature of time.
But in the mid 90s, Bently suggests, there was a new quantitive that emerges that reformulate the relation between past and present and moves towards,
to quote in his words, authenticity as a way of enhancing presence without [INAUDIBLE] epistemology and quote.
Now he formulates this question of authenticity, which is different from the traditional forms related to truth claims.
But I want to take this further and take this seriously to please describe these kinds of
questions in the context of the social which I which I was talking to you about earlier.
Bentley's observations are to be supplied,
supplemented with ideas of ontology and theories of time from other cultural traditions, and not just the Anglo European one.
Why this would be necessary for a proper philosophical study of history?
I think it's far more urgent and necessary for those who write on Southasian history and in general the histories of the West.
Otherwise, that is a danger that they reproduce and impose the conceptual ontological structures of dominant philosophical,
Western philosophical traditions on ideas and practises that are sometimes radically incommensurable.
So what I'm going to do in the remaining part of my title is to offer another set of
arguments from the lived experience of the everyday Sochua to do what Bently is doing,
namely recover some possibility of the ontology of Postrel time, one that is drawn from empirical experiences of India,
but one which I would argue is common across many parts of Asia.
There is a specific problem and this is a problem which is worthwhile keeping in the back of our mind because.
I'm sorry, I think we've lost the audio again.
From the analogy, the philosophy of mathematics and the similar to the analogy with the Descartes in distinction between body and mind,
we can ask the following. And this is a question which is which is famously known as the the problem in philosophy of mathematics.
And the problem is very simple. If mathematical entities are non spatiotemporal,
how is it that human beings as spatiotemporal beings can ever have knowledge about in the context of nature as the they of the in distinction,
of course, that the body and mind are two different kinds of substances, which relates which raises the question, how can you ever have communication?
But in each. Professor Cerca.
Bust that the boss can communicate or relate to the present, since they are of fundamentally different nature.
So even if there's no sorry. Yeah, we lost him just, I think the past minutes or so.
OK, sorry. Yeah, I. Yeah.
Um, so. So listen, can I go ahead?
Yes, yes, please. Yeah, so yeah, so this is a larger question about the how does one even relate to this ontological thing called the past?
And that's part of the problem in trying to make sense of what this past mean and what this time mean in the context of history.
So but we also have to recognise that to to underline the reason why it is useful to draw upon the various intellectual
traditions and the philosophical and the various forms of thinking traditions present in Asian and African societies.
Is that, for example, this problem with understanding the past and engaging with the past have very different philosophical foundations.
For example, just to give you a very brief example, we can talk about it later,
that if you look at almost all the Indian philosophical traditions, they do not distinguish body and mind, as Descartes did.
And thus the connexion between different kinds of substances does not arise in a similar manner.
The past and present are not distinguishable completely, and there remains a constant, accessible link between them.
I mean, this is these are ways of developing questions of what does it mean to access the past and what is what is a realist ontology of the past?
How does it matter for the question of history today?
Now, there are two answers about the reality of the past and connexion to history, which I will suggest here.
The first is from the nature of the present. The present is what is expedients, what is sensorially available.
The present is nothing but the richness of sensations we smattered touch here, taste and see the present.
This offers a simple but paradoxical clue to the past.
To show the connexion between past and the present is to show the possibility of the past being accessed sensorially.
I mean, this might sound absurd when we first encountered this, but this is really the task of this.
My task of showing you how one thinks through this particular claim,
the rejection of the logical past and not its material remnants is also based on it being completely outside of sensorial work.
What I argue is that there is a need to take the past seriously, since that is a mode of sensorial access to it.
I had the second argument to strengthen this claim.
It is that the very possibility of the social is dependent on an ontology of the past and of history.
In this traditional sense, the idea of the social is impossible without a commitment to an ontology of the past and of time,
the socialist produced by the sensorial engagement with the past and the social in turn produces a relation with the past.
So both of the levels of sensations that experience the past is available, both sensorially and as well as in our experience of the social.
I will argue that this is a phenomena that is very clearly reflected in the formulation of the everyday solutions of societies like India.
So what I tried to set up here is to try and see how is the past lack of work in the way our histories are constructed.
Why is it that the past is referred to and engaged with and manipulated and relived,
represented in so many ways as if there is a very deep commitment to the ontology of the past?
And one way to understand it is to go back to what Bently had mentioned.
And I just say a little bit about this without taking too much time.
Bently identifies the specialisation of the past. The specialisation of the past is a problem that plagues ontology of time in history.
All, however, the specialisation seems to be an intrinsic feature of human cognition.
This does not mean that the problems of describing time in the language of space,
which is what specialisation really amounts to the we tend to describe time in the language of space.
So this does not mean that the problems of describing time, the language is insurmountable.
What we need to do is to understand what exactly the specialisation amounts to in the context of time in the past that are two important processes.
One, understanding and describing time through various kinds of specialisations and to the creation of a sense of time within cultures.
And this really creates a conflict between our history and academic history in some sense.
First of all, what is common in our history and Estonians history is that both have a problem in conceptualising time.
And this is a fundamental problem of human cognition, as I mentioned earlier,
because the argument that time is most often conceptualised as spatial metaphors is one way to understand about specialisation of time.
And what this means is we tend to talk.
Time more in the way we talk about space awareness and discourse about time is often through the imagery of space.
Now the implications not of time for sale, but of what we mean by the past.
What we mean by spatial metaphors is that if you ask somebody to say something about time,
the way they will do so will engender draw on images and vocabulary of space.
And this we know from the influential work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson on
conceptual metaphors and the way spatial metaphors are used to talk about time.
For example, a very common example to Holliday's can be described as being close together.
So even though it is separated by time, they're referred to as if are especially close.
We talk about deadlines is rapidly approaching. We look forward to a brighter tomorrow, troubles lie behind us,
etc. So the way we experience time influences the way we talk about the past and future.
And one of the ways we talk about the past is typically we talk as if the past is behind us and the future is ahead of us.
And we tend to just generally point to the future and the past by spatially pointing ahead of us for future and pointing behind our back for the past.
However common these gestures maybe are representative of only one particular conceptualisation of the future and past.
You could even call this a modernist conception of time that I feel newness.
A well-known cognitive scientist use the example of talking to some people on the hillside in the valley,
a remote look up in the mountains of Papua New Guinea.
He asked them to talk about the past and future, and as he is interviewing them, they are using gestures to talk about the past and future.
The person they were interviewing was making the kind of gestures which we are used to.
As Neinas explains. That is when the person at the desk today is hands went backward.
And when he mentioned the model, it leapt forward.
So Nunez and his team were taping him and then they changed the camera angles since the light faded.
And in doing so, they discovered that they were looking at a steep slope which just pointed towards a jagged bridge.
And when they asked the same question about yesterday and tomorrow, Newnes reports that,
quote, Now, when you talked about this today, he gestured forward, not backward.
And he, as he explained tomorrow, he gestured back over his shoulder up towards the ridge.
And what is interesting about this point is actually it's a lovely set of examples which have been produced in this world,
in cognitive science, in our cognition of time and space.
The importance of these observations, the idea of past and future are not universal.
And watch what he points out as the future for this person and this community was not something that is defined as being in front of you.
So what that person was doing was actually pointing to something uphill and Benepe was pointing to us.
I think we've we've lost the audio again.
A gesture of a forward, so he was not talking about forward to something in front of him as something behind it,
but is actually in reference to the question of the mountain that he has to climb.
So now the interesting point is that the community's conception of time is anchored in the contours of the world,
and that changes very drastically the way one understands Dimel in terms of past and future and therefore questions which are fundamental
to the idea of history languages to talk about the past and future have an important role in defining what the past and future can be.
So the belief that as an access to the past and the future independent of the linguistic structure will have should be understood more carefully.
For example, typically in English we say that the past is behind in the future as a friend.
And if you and according to some cognitive scientists, the basis of that is a walking metaphor.
You'll walk to the front, you move towards something,
and there's nothing obvious about time or the past or future in these cultural practises for the immediate South American tribe.
Past is in front and future is behind. And the reason is that you know what is in front of you.
And since you know what is in front of you like perception, if I see something in front of me, I know it is there.
And what the cameras are saying is that the past is the one which I can see is in front of me because I do not see future,
which is therefore is one which is lost behind whatever the theoretical structure of future.
One simple fact seems to be the future, a domain which we do not know anything about.
And this this. So the image of having the future and friend does not make sense to the US because for them what is important is what is known.
And it is a past which is actually new to us. And there are various other interesting example, and I just end with a very short one here.
Even lighting systems influence ideas of past and the future.
And for example, in English, the past is often represented as left word and the future as the right word.
And the argument has been that it is because we write from left to right in order to learn Hebrew.
The past is right and future has left word because that are the opposite direction in Mandarin, pasta, zabo and futureless below.
And so there are all kinds of ways of talking about the past. Now, one might question the importance of these practises.
It just seemed like linguistic practises of kind of reference to certain kinds of ideas which are present in the mind.
But I'll give an example to show how much these linguistic practises of writing actually influence our historical consciousness.
And experiment of a well known experiment illustrates this.
When asked to arrange three temporally ordered images, that is a banana with its appeal intact and a half peeled banana and a banana half eaten.
OK, so you have a full banana then one in which the peel is removed half and the third one and it's half of the banana has been eaten.
And when you ask people to order them,
it was found that English language speakers lay the three objects in an order from left to right in the following manner,
first until banana, then the banana, and then the half eaten banana in the last.
So you can see how the that is a kind of an ordering of a particular process of a
temporal process which is represented in the viewer that you keep them spatially.
Now, very interestingly, in this experiment, and I don't know how robust this experiment is or what are the kinds of variations one could do on this.
However, they found Hebrew speakers lay them out from left,
right to left in exactly the opposite order for English speakers of the objects in the direction of time as moving towards a future.
But as it is the reverse for Hebrew speakers now, such modes of specialisation is very common.
But what is special to this process in the context of history?
So the point that specialisation of time is a problem is is true across a very common problem of human call, not a problem.
It's part of the above. It's a problem of common feature of human cognition.
But what is special to this process in the context of history now?
One of I think the answer I'm going to give here, which might be you don't,
which probably needs a lot more argument than I can given the remaining few minutes,
is that the past and time in history become specialised into the of the specialisation is not just about the kind
of linguistic examples we saw or the reference to the world as we saw with the tribal pointing to the Hill.
But the passage of time in history becomes specialised into the socio the Boston time of histories becomes legend,
the everyday social of these groups.
To make sense of this claim, we need to have an account of what I mean by the everyday social and how it is special to different societies.
So what I would do in the remaining few minutes is to briefly describe the work by
Gopal Guru and myself described in our new book Experience Constant Everyday Social.
Well, not so huge since the twenty nineteen that we formulate a model of social ontology,
one that attempts to capture the uniqueness of Asian and African societies.
And an important aspect of a formulation is that the social is not just an abstract term in a sense like the past,
but one that is sensorially experienced.
We consider the many examples through many examples of nature of the formation of the groups and the experience of Venus,
how the groups come together, how are social challenges of different people,
how are they formed and what is the relationship between the conceptual, social and this particular human process?
Both these points with the everyday social experience aspect of abstract terms
as well as the creation of Venus are relevant for the questions I began with.
What is the sense of me that is present when we use the term of history?
How do histories bring a sense of belongingness in a group of people to make it most?
Specifically, how the notions of time and the past. And why do notions of time in the past produce the sense of Venus, of belonging together?
And that's our approach to the ontology of the social.
Give us a framework to understand how we sensorially access the past or at least talk as if it is a real experience.
So let me begin with a simple characterisation of the very social, as we describe in our book.
So a few parts of what I'm saying here. Is extracted from our milk and there is a lot more a much longer discussion,
as well as many, many more examples to illustrate what we are trying to say.
So I'm just going to use one example of that to show you how our notions of, you know,
responding sensorially to the abstract are often formed in very interesting ways.
So what we describe is this the everyday association.
And by that we begin with the very non-technical definition.
It consists of the social realities of housewives meets children, women in the market,
sanitation workers, interaction on small shops, and these little eating joints, auto drivers,
public door-To-Door countless everyday things and processes around this,
which is a collage of experiences which occur in rural and urban areas, inside and outside houses, within and without institutions.
It most important point to begin with why we begin with this point is because of this it
captures the way by which the first expediencies of the social experience and articulated.
We learn about the idea of the social. We learn about the experience of the social, not through our engagement,
but that valse set out social order and social structures, but through our engagement in our everyday social.
Many of the modes of understanding the social begin to influence the idea of the social
in the larger structural sense that these experiences are the social influence,
how the sense of the social gets formed in categories such as nation, religion, caste and so on.
So these experiences form an awareness of the experience of the social and influence,
the way individuals interact with the impersonal or the institutional social.
So how does one act? I think we're missing your sound.
This post comes from the everyday practises of the social within the family, with friends and in schools,
even as children, we are completely immersed in narratives of the past, time and history.
We begin to form ideas, not just ideas of identity or our place within the society,
but also Whig ideas of the notion of history in this everyday socialisation.
But how do these experiences of what we could call an everyday history relate to the ontologically questions about history?
Let me start with the example of the solution. What is the ontology of the solution?
Is that even something called the social, you know, radical departure from abstract conceptualisation of the solution?
We draw upon the empirical experiences in the Indian context to make the argument
that the solution is sensorially access or at least thought to be sensory.
So again, I give you these examples and a quote from the book.
So the lived experience of the social is made up of sensations which we perceive to stand for the social.
So instead of asking what kind of an entity the socialist,
you ask by asking how the social is perceived at point, which has a very direct analogy with the past.
Instead of asking what kind of an entity the past is, we begin by asking how my causal engagement and my perception of the past is happens.
The social. Odd in the way we formulated, but if we give this example and give you one,
I just talk about one example of sense of smell and touch to illustrate how we set up this argument.
First, there is a sense of seeing cutting, spending, taxing and hitting the social.
So consider that many different ways in which our sense of smell continuously refers to the social.
We define communities by constantly using our sensory capacity of smell in the Indian context.
The examples are numerous, uncountable and endemic to the way we understand communities.
India is not just a land of a thousand mutinies or a million gods.
It's also a land of millions smeltz.
The social raft's into prisons and travels on the back of many different smells that pervade the social domain, the emotional, the social and smells.
Professor, I think we've I think we've lost your audio again.
Qualities like mustard oil and coconut oil, smells, perfumes, like it or not, the USA are all used to refer to the ocean.
Also, as we point out, the smell of garbage is a very important perceptual indicator of a different social.
So the scavenging social is defined by the smell of sewage and garbage,
that there are very deep engagement and interactions with these kinds of smells and other other sensory experiences.
For example, the pollution that arises from that is also relevant for smell.
Thus it was that smelling corpses, for example, would cause ritual pollution for Brandon's asthma.
Just touch it. So smell assumes that significance in the conditions of the cultural asymmetries.
You know, many examples in India, for example, Gujarat,
the owners of houses in Mumbai are notoriously famous for not giving their houses for rent to non vegetarians.
And there are many such examples in South India.
And there are also examples of the Bengali uppercuts being denied houses for rent on the grounds of the fish.
A dominant reason is that the smell associated with cooking fish or meat as well as complex.
It also has very complex ontological beliefs about smells such as the belief that the smell
has become part of the walls of the house and cannot be removed through such processes.
Groups become spatial solutions where people are associated with particular smell will not be allowed to stay.
Smell gets ghettoised and specialised much before people got smells associated with Zeins begin to define the nature of the community,
that there are many indications of the nature of smell and the concomitant experience of the everyday social.
Then the social is experience through this. Then the nature of this sensation will also influence the nature of the social.
And very interestingly, as an anthropologist, Makua points out that the nature of smell becomes associated with qualities such as
moral and aesthetic qualities in these many traditions which write about these in Asian,
in Asian philosophical and cultural traditions.
For example, Macu points out that suffering and impermanence, diseases, poverty, fowl, food, etc. and I tend to smell quite bad.
So but these concepts smell bad, suffering smells bad, impermanence does smells bad, poverty smells bad.
And given the dominance of the notion of carmin these traditions,
it's not perhaps not a surprise to know that in the words of one smell indicates one's karmic past and in nature.
So it has a moral quality which becomes which we discuss in a very in an example of the smell in public spaces,
smell associated of the labour, the smell of sweat and so on.
So what I would say very quickly to conclude this point is that such a metaphysical
position about smell informs understanding of smell and the everyday social world.
It's no longer olfactory smell, but a social smell which does not include olfactory sense.
In fact, one from these examples, you could argue that smell becomes a vehicle for encoding, sustaining and transmitting notions of the ocean.
For example, certain groups traditionally associated with scavenging sometimes are treated as if they continue to carry that smell,
even when they are well-to-do citizens doing various other jobs.
One could claim that they carry the smell as part of the stereotyping and the attempt of humiliation.
So they are when people use smell as a category to categorise the communities,
they are in essence saying that the group comes into being as a group because of social smell associated with that sociality.
And that is another way to perceive this ocean and as an important way by which the social is experienced by us.
The sociality of cost is primarily through the sensation and repulsion of what we call as social touch.
When the people of the same caste that each other, there is a different sense of touch which we love and care.
But an upper class such as the lower class.
What is the quality of this Dutch that are many illustrations of touching and touch that go to form the experience and narrative of the social?
So notions of that range from not touching some human beings or not putting your museum pieces.
So we actually discussed this much more extensively on the phenomenology in Archaeology of Touch in the book on the cognitive.
But you could see what we are trying to do here is to say that the collective
experience in many situations has a lot to do with the nature of touch with jazz,
because and these things are not about that as a kind of a physical experience of a particular kind of something to do with some sensory organs,
all kinds of cultural practises and the formulation of conceptual world, which makes sense of these practises,
including questions of what is social and what is time and what is the boss are influenced by these views on simple.
Things like smell and touch, so and of course, it is taken up most powerfully and perhaps most egregiously in the context of untouchability,
where you have a completely different metaphysics of the very idea of touch and not touching somebody else.
So this is so what I'm trying to say is it is not possible to understand these and many other social phenomena only in terms of the actions,
motivation and desires of individuals. The phenomenon of social touch is based on an ontology of touch.
And here is where phenomena, the phenomenon of the past, the ontology of the past,
is very closely linked to what I'm going to say here in the everyday social that
goes in so many ways is exemplified in Hindu religious practises and syncretic in
other religious practises to disastrous to the practises and rituals around touchin
and the constant engagement with questions of touching God's time as a God,
of course, which is a very different way of looking at this whole thing. Professor, I think you sound we've lost it again.
Yeah, sorry, yeah, can you hear me now?
Yes, perfectly, yeah, yeah. So I'm coming to the end of this just a couple of minutes, so.
Yeah. So social touch is not the touch of one individual or another, not the touch of one hand on another.
It's a touch of the social on us and our touch on the social.
OK, now so we can let me try and show directly kind of a link to the question about the past and time and hopefully with this very
brief introduction to the kind of ideas of the engi of the experience of the social and the abstract sense of the social.
Let's see how this extends into the the first arguments that I began with.
So the basic argument is this history is an integral part of the everyday social,
as we began with, and that as gave examples, that is the baby formulate a sense of history.
But yet again, I want to clarify again that I'm not getting into the dispute about which kind of history
is that academic part of history or that the many different branches of history and so on.
History, as I explained earlier, in what sense I was using that done. So history is an integral part of the everyday social and the ideas of history.
The everyday practises also embody social characteristics of the everyday social.
For example, in the book we discuss four important characteristics. The very important first one is about Venus.
What is it about the nature of the social that produces the question of identities, of group identities and notions of saying belongingness.
And if you don't want to use terms around identity, the notion of belonging to something, that notion of Venus.
And then the second point is about authority, which is produced through this this invisible social.
And the third part, which is very important to the everyday social, is a production of time,
its own, its own examples of time, its own ontologies and characteristics of time.
And that's another chapter we talk about in that example.
And then finally, of course, in ethics of Social, which becomes a question of ethics, of historicism.
Thus historical consciousness goes hand in hand with the consciousness of the social and then the social is seen to be sensorially accessible.
So is is thus. Our history is firstly a creation of the social group, which is bound together through an articulation of the collective history.
It's a history that's discovered and produced constantly.
Historical consciousness is a necessary requirement for the protection of social consciousness and the historical,
which is immersed in an ontology of the past and time is specialised into the everyday social.
In so doing,
it enables the historical to be sensorially accessible in the way the social becomes accessible through the sense of through the senses as described.
And I just stop here so that you will have some time for a few questions.
But the final part of this to conclude the much larger argument is to show how the hyperreality of the past is actually produced.
I come from. We professor, we've just lost the very end.
Of your lecture. So much for allowing me to share these ideas with you.
Uh.