1 00:00:00,240 --> 00:00:06,510 Thank you, Zubia, it's a great pleasure and honour to be speaking in this particular forum. 2 00:00:06,510 --> 00:00:14,760 As you know, I was quite reluctant or hesitant because I was really hesitant to talk to a 3 00:00:14,760 --> 00:00:20,520 community of historians since I'm not a historian in any measure of the term. 4 00:00:20,520 --> 00:00:27,240 But I was encouraged by the fact that you were open to looking at questions around the 5 00:00:27,240 --> 00:00:33,240 theme of history from different disciplines so foolishly or bravely jumped into this. 6 00:00:33,240 --> 00:00:39,690 And let's see the end of it. How foolish I have been. 7 00:00:39,690 --> 00:00:47,100 I want to take this opportunity to talk about some work that I've been doing for quite some time on 8 00:00:47,100 --> 00:00:52,590 trying to understand the nature of society and in particular the work and my with my collaborator, 9 00:00:52,590 --> 00:00:59,760 plus a global guru with whom we have written two books on this particular topic. 10 00:00:59,760 --> 00:01:05,190 Let me try and related to the question of history, which is always at the back of the book, 11 00:01:05,190 --> 00:01:14,430 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, 12 00:01:14,430 --> 00:01:23,160 what struck us was that in all our engagement with so many communities around the country under different points of time, 13 00:01:23,160 --> 00:01:30,150 there was always an incipient historical consciousness present in people, and that is nothing new. 14 00:01:30,150 --> 00:01:38,220 But what was interesting is the way in which this historical consciousness shaped their social imagination. 15 00:01:38,220 --> 00:01:42,150 So I'm going to speak just on that specific topic here. 16 00:01:42,150 --> 00:01:46,710 I know there's been a huge amount of work in history dealing with the relationship 17 00:01:46,710 --> 00:01:52,110 with larger questions of sociology and history and of accounts of ordinary people. 18 00:01:52,110 --> 00:01:57,300 But I want to use that term to really engage with this question of our history, 19 00:01:57,300 --> 00:02:03,030 a term which repeatedly vowed contact we repeatedly encounter today when I talk 20 00:02:03,030 --> 00:02:08,730 to communities and individuals in their invocation of an idea of our history, 21 00:02:08,730 --> 00:02:17,520 something that belongs to them. So then I want to ask the question, what is this history that they think belongs to them? 22 00:02:17,520 --> 00:02:22,680 What is the sense of belongingness that one develops with the idea of history? 23 00:02:22,680 --> 00:02:28,350 So it's going to be a very satiric kind of reflection on this. 24 00:02:28,350 --> 00:02:34,770 But I welcome kind of critical comments and suggestions at the end of my talk. 25 00:02:34,770 --> 00:02:37,740 So it's it's a long paper, but I'm not gonna read the paper in full, 26 00:02:37,740 --> 00:02:44,190 but I'm going to try and highlight some of the points which is presented in this particular paper. 27 00:02:44,190 --> 00:02:50,340 So let me begin with. Are we trying to make sense of this idea of our history? 28 00:02:50,340 --> 00:02:55,560 So in this talk, I'll attempt to make sense of a phenomenon that I see all the time and across the country, 29 00:02:55,560 --> 00:03:01,230 which is the way common people conceptualise and articulate their sense and experience of history. 30 00:03:01,230 --> 00:03:05,730 What I mean by that account of history about themselves and their communities is 31 00:03:05,730 --> 00:03:10,500 not history that is validated according to the tenets of history as a discipline. 32 00:03:10,500 --> 00:03:18,060 Nevertheless, it is a sense of history in that it deals primarily with the past, with accounts of events, 33 00:03:18,060 --> 00:03:22,890 with chronology and other elements that are also of interest to the discipline of history. 34 00:03:22,890 --> 00:03:28,800 Whenever such self accounts of history conflict with the professional historian, they they're often dismissed. 35 00:03:28,800 --> 00:03:37,440 Interestingly, both sides of the of the debate in the debate dismiss each other's history as we know well, 36 00:03:37,440 --> 00:03:45,330 has become a primary site of contention in public discourse. And that's particularly dangerous political consequences in the India of today. 37 00:03:45,330 --> 00:03:53,400 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, 38 00:03:53,400 --> 00:04:00,300 but to understand the implications of the self accounts of history for a philosophy of history. 39 00:04:00,300 --> 00:04:07,870 So what little confidence I would have to speak about this is going to be around the ideal of philosophy of history, 40 00:04:07,870 --> 00:04:13,350 certain philosophical questions around this thing, this activity called history. 41 00:04:13,350 --> 00:04:17,970 I'm also convinced that such an explanation is absolutely essential when we engage 42 00:04:17,970 --> 00:04:22,680 in South Asian cultures and perhaps other contiguous cultures in Asia and Africa. 43 00:04:22,680 --> 00:04:28,080 I do find it problematic that intellectual practises from these cultures do not 44 00:04:28,080 --> 00:04:32,790 become part of the theoretical and philosophical discussions about history. 45 00:04:32,790 --> 00:04:38,550 How much of the historical reflection on South Asia actually draws upon the conceptual categories of 46 00:04:38,550 --> 00:04:45,450 the many traditions ranging from the mainstream to the subaltern in order to understand the processes, 47 00:04:45,450 --> 00:04:49,680 the conceptual foundations and the philosophies of their own histories? 48 00:04:49,680 --> 00:04:54,270 How is it possible to understand the enormous production of work on conceptual foundations 49 00:04:54,270 --> 00:04:59,630 of history with comparatively insignificant philosophical and conceptual basis? 50 00:04:59,630 --> 00:05:06,710 Non Western traditions, what are the challenges such a view raises for the discipline of history itself? 51 00:05:06,710 --> 00:05:12,860 Gopal Guru, my colleague and my collaborator now work was also there with us today, 52 00:05:12,860 --> 00:05:19,850 famously used a phrase to call them theoretical Brahmins and empirical should shooters in order to highlight the problem of 53 00:05:19,850 --> 00:05:28,010 reducing the Dalitz to pure empirical subjects who did not have the capacity to theorise about their own lives in the same way. 54 00:05:28,010 --> 00:05:34,460 One can ask whether most parts of Asia and Africa continue to remain purely empirical subjects who do not 55 00:05:34,460 --> 00:05:40,460 have the capacity or the vocabulary to produce theoretical reflection to diminish their own condition, 56 00:05:40,460 --> 00:05:47,150 if not their own condition, if not that of others in the West. While I will not deal with this debate directly, 57 00:05:47,150 --> 00:05:53,330 this theme hovers in the background of my talk as I will explore the absence of drawing upon lived 58 00:05:53,330 --> 00:05:59,810 experiences of histories from communities in India in a global philosophical reflections on history. 59 00:05:59,810 --> 00:06:05,990 Many of the articulations that describe the various communities and groups in India have a self description of the histories of themselves. 60 00:06:05,990 --> 00:06:11,480 It is a history that is often articulated as our history, their history, which they identify with, 61 00:06:11,480 --> 00:06:17,330 and the history that causally influences how they perceive the present and act towards the future. 62 00:06:17,330 --> 00:06:23,540 It's producing narratives. Every caste produces caste narratives of this kind. 63 00:06:23,540 --> 00:06:31,370 It is part of everyday talk of various religious sects. It's integral to the identities which different groups form politically and socially. 64 00:06:31,370 --> 00:06:38,060 This history is replete with events, with personalities, with chronologies of what happen when and to whom. 65 00:06:38,060 --> 00:06:44,990 It's also closely related to the everyday practise. And it's not just an intellectual position which they take very often. 66 00:06:44,990 --> 00:06:47,360 They differ from the history of the historians. 67 00:06:47,360 --> 00:06:54,890 One common difference, of course, is that correct date of events and the time in which somebody lived and many times other histories. 68 00:06:54,890 --> 00:07:01,010 And I'm going to keep using the word histories and I I'm going I'm writing it. 69 00:07:01,010 --> 00:07:06,740 I put our in quotes, but just when I'm speaking, whenever I invoke our histories, 70 00:07:06,740 --> 00:07:11,570 I'm not talking about art in the sense of I belong in my belongingness to history. 71 00:07:11,570 --> 00:07:18,920 But this category called histories, people's history and history, which creates a sense of belongingness within communities. 72 00:07:18,920 --> 00:07:23,680 So we know that many of these are histories that exaggerated sense of time frames. 73 00:07:23,680 --> 00:07:31,940 However, I have often found it impossible to try and engage them in a critique of them that this idea of numbers for time, 74 00:07:31,940 --> 00:07:35,030 for example, or reducing number to timeline's. 75 00:07:35,030 --> 00:07:40,550 This is a point which is worth discussing in great detail, since it connects to the ontology of time to that of mathematics. 76 00:07:40,550 --> 00:07:46,670 But I shall not do that. There is also a mismatch of vocabulary since the description of our history invokes 77 00:07:46,670 --> 00:07:50,900 concepts that do not occur in the modernised academy discourse of history. 78 00:07:50,900 --> 00:07:54,590 So my focus on this talk is not whether these accounts should be seen as 79 00:07:54,590 --> 00:07:58,550 historical or whether they should be located in the domains of myth and fiction, 80 00:07:58,550 --> 00:08:03,440 or as is increasingly been involved in the domain of political ideologies. 81 00:08:03,440 --> 00:08:07,610 I'm more interested in the process of this particular sociality, 82 00:08:07,610 --> 00:08:13,490 this particular process of a group of people coming together as a group by invoking the idea of history. 83 00:08:13,490 --> 00:08:16,880 There are two major themes in this formation of our histories. 84 00:08:16,880 --> 00:08:24,890 First, we recognise that the group formation always seems to produce our histories as, as I just explained, 85 00:08:24,890 --> 00:08:31,610 put on writing of communities, continuing everyday practise as it was practised hundreds of years ago, 86 00:08:31,610 --> 00:08:42,260 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. 87 00:08:42,260 --> 00:08:48,470 This leads us to enquire into the relation between the histories and the formation of the social group around these histories. 88 00:08:48,470 --> 00:08:53,990 What is it about history that characterises this coming together that provokes an ideal venus', 89 00:08:53,990 --> 00:08:57,290 that makes them articulate what they see as art history? 90 00:08:57,290 --> 00:09:05,180 What is it about social formation that makes it seem as if historical accounts are essential to the formation of a social equivalently, 91 00:09:05,180 --> 00:09:10,880 given the close connexion between the historical and social? How do we talk about the sociality of history? 92 00:09:10,880 --> 00:09:16,850 Like we would talk about social realities of various group formation like that, of course, class, gender and religion. 93 00:09:16,850 --> 00:09:24,110 On the other hand, we also recognise that the social needs, history, historical narratives, historical ontologies. 94 00:09:24,110 --> 00:09:29,210 So the first part of my thought will try and address some of these concerns. 95 00:09:29,210 --> 00:09:36,050 Secondly, one of the striking features of our history is its hyper reality and its a hyper reality of the past. 96 00:09:36,050 --> 00:09:43,610 In our histories, the past becomes far more real and present than when it is filtered through the goals and aims of academic history. 97 00:09:43,610 --> 00:09:50,690 This hyper reality of the past makes artefacts and people of the past take on a greater than real presence in today's world. 98 00:09:50,690 --> 00:09:54,320 This presents as causal influences in the contemporary solution. 99 00:09:54,320 --> 00:09:59,200 As we see in the politics of today, it has a significant effect on individuals and families. 100 00:09:59,200 --> 00:10:06,040 Many times in the day to day lives, what interests me about this hyper realism are insights into the ontology of history, 101 00:10:06,040 --> 00:10:08,780 particularly the ontological status of the past. 102 00:10:08,780 --> 00:10:16,450 In particular, this ontology of the past, exemplified in our histories, showed a deep and intriguing relation with Dutch, 103 00:10:16,450 --> 00:10:24,580 maybe asking us to take more seriously the phenomenological experience of touching the past and touching history, 104 00:10:24,580 --> 00:10:28,720 the complexity of touch as a deep relationship to the structures of Indian society. 105 00:10:28,720 --> 00:10:33,440 And we can draw upon this to understand the everyday possibility of touching the past. 106 00:10:33,440 --> 00:10:37,240 That is a common sense of touching objects of history in our daily lives. 107 00:10:37,240 --> 00:10:41,020 People's descriptions of individual and community histories often talk about 108 00:10:41,020 --> 00:10:46,730 historical terms and historical artefact as if they are sensorially accessible. 109 00:10:46,730 --> 00:10:52,520 History arises in this domain, not as a set of intangible facts on knowledge claims, 110 00:10:52,520 --> 00:10:58,520 but as a sensorium that is most dominantly influenced by the sense of touch. 111 00:10:58,520 --> 00:11:05,150 To understand this, we have to, of course, start with the assumption that what sets societies apart is that metaphysics, 112 00:11:05,150 --> 00:11:11,450 the cultural philosophies that underlies the beliefs and practises, and it is not us, it is not an accident. 113 00:11:11,450 --> 00:11:14,780 And surprising that that's such an important role here, 114 00:11:14,780 --> 00:11:21,830 because one of the most important complex metaphysical category that underlies Indian experiences is the concept of touch, 115 00:11:21,830 --> 00:11:28,190 a theme which should be explored in great detail and myself in our first DiCamillo. 116 00:11:28,190 --> 00:11:33,230 So the formation of self knowledgeable communities is not special to history. 117 00:11:33,230 --> 00:11:39,710 Lay descriptions of social phenomena also show similar practises. The way people talk about religion and caste, for example, 118 00:11:39,710 --> 00:11:44,540 can be quite different from the approach and disciplines such as religious studies or sociology. 119 00:11:44,540 --> 00:11:48,920 People's self understanding of caste very often as completely different narratives. 120 00:11:48,920 --> 00:11:54,050 The sociological descriptions in it is. 121 00:11:54,050 --> 00:12:02,180 It is true that as laypeople we do not possess the expert knowledge and you can look at analogies in various dimensions. 122 00:12:02,180 --> 00:12:08,530 But the the the passing point I want to make it is that history too is like this. 123 00:12:08,530 --> 00:12:11,660 Historians have expert knowledge, but the products of history, 124 00:12:11,660 --> 00:12:19,040 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. 125 00:12:19,040 --> 00:12:23,000 And I think it's a term which I would like to use just in passing. 126 00:12:23,000 --> 00:12:31,910 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, 127 00:12:31,910 --> 00:12:36,560 which if you want to find of structuralist, which is very useful, 128 00:12:36,560 --> 00:12:43,100 very popular in the post constructiveness to disclose is Bacolod history as a collage. 129 00:12:43,100 --> 00:12:52,130 And the Jugaad history, which characterises what we see as many aspects of the doing within Indian societies, 130 00:12:52,130 --> 00:13:01,830 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 131 00:13:01,830 --> 00:13:06,390 a lot of it goes back to a fundamental question in the philosophy of history, 132 00:13:06,390 --> 00:13:10,800 which is the problematic claim about the ontologies of history, 133 00:13:10,800 --> 00:13:20,040 what kind of objects entities that history talks about and what kind of commitment, what kind of ontological commitment do you want to make? 134 00:13:20,040 --> 00:13:25,650 Two terms that are talked about in history that are the objects of discourse in history. 135 00:13:25,650 --> 00:13:27,180 What kind of ontologically come in. 136 00:13:27,180 --> 00:13:36,240 So let me introduce this as a as the way in which I want to understand this particular relationship between the historical and sociological. 137 00:13:36,240 --> 00:13:40,920 So the question of history in the writings of history, such as social history, cultural history, 138 00:13:40,920 --> 00:13:48,330 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. 139 00:13:48,330 --> 00:13:54,360 This question is really the crux of the problem. And the question is what is the history in our history? 140 00:13:54,360 --> 00:13:59,130 You could like the question was for us, what is the history and social history, for example? 141 00:13:59,130 --> 00:14:05,820 There is no easy answer, primarily because the definition of history has become so fractured into so many types of histories. 142 00:14:05,820 --> 00:14:12,960 In particular, the confusion regarding history and social history leads to questions about the goals, methods, as well as a matter of history. 143 00:14:12,960 --> 00:14:17,220 As Gertrude Himelfarb in the paper in the American Historical Review notes, 144 00:14:17,220 --> 00:14:23,340 the proliferation of the varieties of new history has led to basic questions on the historical nature of these histories. 145 00:14:23,340 --> 00:14:27,780 She agrees with suggestions that Cold War history has to be put into social history and 146 00:14:27,780 --> 00:14:32,970 called a crucial lack in these new histories was the lack of what she calls central themes, 147 00:14:32,970 --> 00:14:40,830 frameworks and significant questions. One of the points of recovery of traditional ideas of history in the face of these new history, 148 00:14:40,830 --> 00:14:45,240 including deconstruction of history, is to go back to certain foundational themes in history. 149 00:14:45,240 --> 00:14:51,870 Himelfarb points out that historians of different colours have gladly disputed the reality of historical past. 150 00:14:51,870 --> 00:14:57,630 So this phrase that she uses to counter the really disparate reality of the 151 00:14:57,630 --> 00:15:03,510 historical historical past becomes the core element which one can hold on to. 152 00:15:03,510 --> 00:15:09,610 Even in the past, as a matter of dispute of imperfect description, that nevertheless there is a task of history, 153 00:15:09,610 --> 00:15:14,200 was a serious engagement with the past and attempts to respond to these imperfections. 154 00:15:14,200 --> 00:15:21,030 But she argues the new historians make the past, quote, more indeterminate, more elusive, 155 00:15:21,030 --> 00:15:27,450 less real than it has ever been, and could lead to new possibilities of history. 156 00:15:27,450 --> 00:15:32,400 So the notion of history that I'm using here is not really about these questions of new histories. 157 00:15:32,400 --> 00:15:37,280 It's a history of groups that claim a sense of history as an essential part of the social realities. 158 00:15:37,280 --> 00:15:41,520 Interestingly, semantic structure is not very different from the themes of traditional history. 159 00:15:41,520 --> 00:15:47,460 In particular, the notion of the past is extremely important in this, and it is not the past that is, 160 00:15:47,460 --> 00:15:51,600 to use the words of Himelfarb, more indeterminate, more elusive, less severe. 161 00:15:51,600 --> 00:15:56,110 But in contrast is a past that is hyper determinate. Absolutely. 162 00:15:56,110 --> 00:16:02,040 And graspable concrete ontology that underlies our history is actually a more robust 163 00:16:02,040 --> 00:16:05,910 version of the ontology that characterises traditional historical questions. 164 00:16:05,910 --> 00:16:12,870 But where there is significant difference, the methods and the uses to which this ontology is put, 165 00:16:12,870 --> 00:16:20,250 and I find a very useful way to enter into this discussion and to lead it into the questions which I'm posing for. 166 00:16:20,250 --> 00:16:26,940 Trying to make sense of history in the South Asian context of the Indian context is through paper, 167 00:16:26,940 --> 00:16:31,650 which I find very useful by a British historian, Michael Bently, a British historian. 168 00:16:31,650 --> 00:16:36,520 Michael Bently newspaper Boston Presents Revisiting Historical Ontology Publishing 169 00:16:36,520 --> 00:16:40,170 Entity points out that the developments in history over the last 30 years 170 00:16:40,170 --> 00:16:44,850 and he's writing this in it's published in 2006 that the development of this 171 00:16:44,850 --> 00:16:49,530 for the past 30 years has moved away attention from the nature of the past, 172 00:16:49,530 --> 00:16:54,180 which has become diffused and subject to what he calls imagination is the victim. 173 00:16:54,180 --> 00:17:06,040 He also isolates a particular reason that of the specialisation of time, which he believes. 174 00:17:06,040 --> 00:17:21,190 I think computer. Yeah, I we can't seem to hear you. 175 00:17:21,190 --> 00:17:25,000 The pain of the past is never present, but neither is it an absence, 176 00:17:25,000 --> 00:17:30,610 and the basic thrust of his argument is that the past, present and future are intertwined, intertwined. 177 00:17:30,610 --> 00:17:34,000 And he uses the term prototype to describe, 178 00:17:34,000 --> 00:17:40,480 to call them conceptual enlightenment that governs the modes and code by which this intervention is conceived. 179 00:17:40,480 --> 00:17:51,250 So basically, he is trying to find a way which moves away from ideas that past is is a fictionalised creation. 180 00:17:51,250 --> 00:17:57,160 It is idealistic or the kind of a mental creation or that it is even more passive in nature. 181 00:17:57,160 --> 00:18:06,670 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. 182 00:18:06,670 --> 00:18:14,950 And he also argues that at the same time, it's important to not ignore the ontology of the past in all its complexity. 183 00:18:14,950 --> 00:18:16,150 Instead, he says, 184 00:18:16,150 --> 00:18:24,910 scientific modernism became the guiding principle for history in the early parts of the 20th century and post 1970s into the post-war activism. 185 00:18:24,910 --> 00:18:30,130 Bentley notes that with the work of Bot's Fugo and Hadyn Way White, 186 00:18:30,130 --> 00:18:38,230 although they had important things to say about epistemology they took away, took the past of it altogether, end quote. 187 00:18:38,230 --> 00:18:44,590 And this yota perceptively notes that this movement banished, in his words, 188 00:18:44,590 --> 00:18:50,890 banish the past into nothingness with no power to affect its futures and and therefore 189 00:18:50,890 --> 00:18:56,140 leads to a focus on questions of memory and narratives which become privileged. 190 00:18:56,140 --> 00:19:04,420 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. 191 00:19:04,420 --> 00:19:11,590 Much of the rejection of the past was based on naive realism of the past and time and the nature of time. 192 00:19:11,590 --> 00:19:21,460 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, 193 00:19:21,460 --> 00:19:28,930 to quote in his words, authenticity as a way of enhancing presence without [INAUDIBLE] epistemology and quote. 194 00:19:28,930 --> 00:19:35,560 Now he formulates this question of authenticity, which is different from the traditional forms related to truth claims. 195 00:19:35,560 --> 00:19:43,210 But I want to take this further and take this seriously to please describe these kinds of 196 00:19:43,210 --> 00:19:48,730 questions in the context of the social which I which I was talking to you about earlier. 197 00:19:48,730 --> 00:19:50,860 Bentley's observations are to be supplied, 198 00:19:50,860 --> 00:19:59,000 supplemented with ideas of ontology and theories of time from other cultural traditions, and not just the Anglo European one. 199 00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:02,830 Why this would be necessary for a proper philosophical study of history? 200 00:20:02,830 --> 00:20:10,840 I think it's far more urgent and necessary for those who write on Southasian history and in general the histories of the West. 201 00:20:10,840 --> 00:20:17,800 Otherwise, that is a danger that they reproduce and impose the conceptual ontological structures of dominant philosophical, 202 00:20:17,800 --> 00:20:25,240 Western philosophical traditions on ideas and practises that are sometimes radically incommensurable. 203 00:20:25,240 --> 00:20:30,460 So what I'm going to do in the remaining part of my title is to offer another set of 204 00:20:30,460 --> 00:20:35,560 arguments from the lived experience of the everyday Sochua to do what Bently is doing, 205 00:20:35,560 --> 00:20:43,690 namely recover some possibility of the ontology of Postrel time, one that is drawn from empirical experiences of India, 206 00:20:43,690 --> 00:20:48,430 but one which I would argue is common across many parts of Asia. 207 00:20:48,430 --> 00:21:09,170 There is a specific problem and this is a problem which is worthwhile keeping in the back of our mind because. 208 00:21:09,170 --> 00:21:13,820 I'm sorry, I think we've lost the audio again. 209 00:21:13,820 --> 00:21:22,760 From the analogy, the philosophy of mathematics and the similar to the analogy with the Descartes in distinction between body and mind, 210 00:21:22,760 --> 00:21:30,320 we can ask the following. And this is a question which is which is famously known as the the problem in philosophy of mathematics. 211 00:21:30,320 --> 00:21:35,570 And the problem is very simple. If mathematical entities are non spatiotemporal, 212 00:21:35,570 --> 00:21:46,910 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, 213 00:21:46,910 --> 00:21:56,030 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? 214 00:21:56,030 --> 00:22:17,430 But in each. Professor Cerca. 215 00:22:17,430 --> 00:22:25,440 Bust that the boss can communicate or relate to the present, since they are of fundamentally different nature. 216 00:22:25,440 --> 00:22:36,030 So even if there's no sorry. Yeah, we lost him just, I think the past minutes or so. 217 00:22:36,030 --> 00:22:40,750 OK, sorry. Yeah, I. Yeah. 218 00:22:40,750 --> 00:22:54,270 Um, so. So listen, can I go ahead? 219 00:22:54,270 --> 00:23:05,580 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? 220 00:23:05,580 --> 00:23:12,270 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. 221 00:23:12,270 --> 00:23:20,640 So but we also have to recognise that to to underline the reason why it is useful to draw upon the various intellectual 222 00:23:20,640 --> 00:23:28,200 traditions and the philosophical and the various forms of thinking traditions present in Asian and African societies. 223 00:23:28,200 --> 00:23:37,200 Is that, for example, this problem with understanding the past and engaging with the past have very different philosophical foundations. 224 00:23:37,200 --> 00:23:40,980 For example, just to give you a very brief example, we can talk about it later, 225 00:23:40,980 --> 00:23:49,020 that if you look at almost all the Indian philosophical traditions, they do not distinguish body and mind, as Descartes did. 226 00:23:49,020 --> 00:23:54,750 And thus the connexion between different kinds of substances does not arise in a similar manner. 227 00:23:54,750 --> 00:24:01,650 The past and present are not distinguishable completely, and there remains a constant, accessible link between them. 228 00:24:01,650 --> 00:24:11,760 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? 229 00:24:11,760 --> 00:24:15,090 How does it matter for the question of history today? 230 00:24:15,090 --> 00:24:21,420 Now, there are two answers about the reality of the past and connexion to history, which I will suggest here. 231 00:24:21,420 --> 00:24:27,350 The first is from the nature of the present. The present is what is expedients, what is sensorially available. 232 00:24:27,350 --> 00:24:34,380 The present is nothing but the richness of sensations we smattered touch here, taste and see the present. 233 00:24:34,380 --> 00:24:37,950 This offers a simple but paradoxical clue to the past. 234 00:24:37,950 --> 00:24:44,640 To show the connexion between past and the present is to show the possibility of the past being accessed sensorially. 235 00:24:44,640 --> 00:24:54,270 I mean, this might sound absurd when we first encountered this, but this is really the task of this. 236 00:24:54,270 --> 00:24:58,710 My task of showing you how one thinks through this particular claim, 237 00:24:58,710 --> 00:25:07,080 the rejection of the logical past and not its material remnants is also based on it being completely outside of sensorial work. 238 00:25:07,080 --> 00:25:12,990 What I argue is that there is a need to take the past seriously, since that is a mode of sensorial access to it. 239 00:25:12,990 --> 00:25:15,780 I had the second argument to strengthen this claim. 240 00:25:15,780 --> 00:25:22,140 It is that the very possibility of the social is dependent on an ontology of the past and of history. 241 00:25:22,140 --> 00:25:29,760 In this traditional sense, the idea of the social is impossible without a commitment to an ontology of the past and of time, 242 00:25:29,760 --> 00:25:37,320 the socialist produced by the sensorial engagement with the past and the social in turn produces a relation with the past. 243 00:25:37,320 --> 00:25:45,780 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. 244 00:25:45,780 --> 00:25:54,210 I will argue that this is a phenomena that is very clearly reflected in the formulation of the everyday solutions of societies like India. 245 00:25:54,210 --> 00:26:06,180 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. 246 00:26:06,180 --> 00:26:15,840 Why is it that the past is referred to and engaged with and manipulated and relived, 247 00:26:15,840 --> 00:26:22,080 represented in so many ways as if there is a very deep commitment to the ontology of the past? 248 00:26:22,080 --> 00:26:26,190 And one way to understand it is to go back to what Bently had mentioned. 249 00:26:26,190 --> 00:26:30,390 And I just say a little bit about this without taking too much time. 250 00:26:30,390 --> 00:26:38,310 Bently identifies the specialisation of the past. The specialisation of the past is a problem that plagues ontology of time in history. 251 00:26:38,310 --> 00:26:43,080 All, however, the specialisation seems to be an intrinsic feature of human cognition. 252 00:26:43,080 --> 00:26:47,970 This does not mean that the problems of describing time in the language of space, 253 00:26:47,970 --> 00:26:54,090 which is what specialisation really amounts to the we tend to describe time in the language of space. 254 00:26:54,090 --> 00:26:58,500 So this does not mean that the problems of describing time, the language is insurmountable. 255 00:26:58,500 --> 00:27:06,930 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. 256 00:27:06,930 --> 00:27:16,110 One, understanding and describing time through various kinds of specialisations and to the creation of a sense of time within cultures. 257 00:27:16,110 --> 00:27:22,230 And this really creates a conflict between our history and academic history in some sense. 258 00:27:22,230 --> 00:27:29,850 First of all, what is common in our history and Estonians history is that both have a problem in conceptualising time. 259 00:27:29,850 --> 00:27:33,450 And this is a fundamental problem of human cognition, as I mentioned earlier, 260 00:27:33,450 --> 00:27:41,460 because the argument that time is most often conceptualised as spatial metaphors is one way to understand about specialisation of time. 261 00:27:41,460 --> 00:27:43,680 And what this means is we tend to talk. 262 00:27:43,680 --> 00:27:52,170 Time more in the way we talk about space awareness and discourse about time is often through the imagery of space. 263 00:27:52,170 --> 00:27:58,610 Now the implications not of time for sale, but of what we mean by the past. 264 00:27:58,610 --> 00:28:03,640 What we mean by spatial metaphors is that if you ask somebody to say something about time, 265 00:28:03,640 --> 00:28:09,430 the way they will do so will engender draw on images and vocabulary of space. 266 00:28:09,430 --> 00:28:13,870 And this we know from the influential work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson on 267 00:28:13,870 --> 00:28:18,040 conceptual metaphors and the way spatial metaphors are used to talk about time. 268 00:28:18,040 --> 00:28:23,590 For example, a very common example to Holliday's can be described as being close together. 269 00:28:23,590 --> 00:28:28,730 So even though it is separated by time, they're referred to as if are especially close. 270 00:28:28,730 --> 00:28:35,490 We talk about deadlines is rapidly approaching. We look forward to a brighter tomorrow, troubles lie behind us, 271 00:28:35,490 --> 00:28:41,170 etc. So the way we experience time influences the way we talk about the past and future. 272 00:28:41,170 --> 00:28:48,370 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. 273 00:28:48,370 --> 00:28:57,760 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. 274 00:28:57,760 --> 00:29:05,500 However common these gestures maybe are representative of only one particular conceptualisation of the future and past. 275 00:29:05,500 --> 00:29:09,610 You could even call this a modernist conception of time that I feel newness. 276 00:29:09,610 --> 00:29:15,790 A well-known cognitive scientist use the example of talking to some people on the hillside in the valley, 277 00:29:15,790 --> 00:29:19,090 a remote look up in the mountains of Papua New Guinea. 278 00:29:19,090 --> 00:29:26,860 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. 279 00:29:26,860 --> 00:29:32,200 The person they were interviewing was making the kind of gestures which we are used to. 280 00:29:32,200 --> 00:29:38,170 As Neinas explains. That is when the person at the desk today is hands went backward. 281 00:29:38,170 --> 00:29:41,050 And when he mentioned the model, it leapt forward. 282 00:29:41,050 --> 00:29:46,690 So Nunez and his team were taping him and then they changed the camera angles since the light faded. 283 00:29:46,690 --> 00:29:54,550 And in doing so, they discovered that they were looking at a steep slope which just pointed towards a jagged bridge. 284 00:29:54,550 --> 00:29:59,560 And when they asked the same question about yesterday and tomorrow, Newnes reports that, 285 00:29:59,560 --> 00:30:05,050 quote, Now, when you talked about this today, he gestured forward, not backward. 286 00:30:05,050 --> 00:30:11,080 And he, as he explained tomorrow, he gestured back over his shoulder up towards the ridge. 287 00:30:11,080 --> 00:30:18,670 And what is interesting about this point is actually it's a lovely set of examples which have been produced in this world, 288 00:30:18,670 --> 00:30:22,660 in cognitive science, in our cognition of time and space. 289 00:30:22,660 --> 00:30:27,130 The importance of these observations, the idea of past and future are not universal. 290 00:30:27,130 --> 00:30:34,420 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. 291 00:30:34,420 --> 00:30:47,920 So what that person was doing was actually pointing to something uphill and Benepe was pointing to us. 292 00:30:47,920 --> 00:31:02,470 I think we've we've lost the audio again. 293 00:31:02,470 --> 00:31:09,610 A gesture of a forward, so he was not talking about forward to something in front of him as something behind it, 294 00:31:09,610 --> 00:31:14,950 but is actually in reference to the question of the mountain that he has to climb. 295 00:31:14,950 --> 00:31:22,390 So now the interesting point is that the community's conception of time is anchored in the contours of the world, 296 00:31:22,390 --> 00:31:31,480 and that changes very drastically the way one understands Dimel in terms of past and future and therefore questions which are fundamental 297 00:31:31,480 --> 00:31:39,190 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. 298 00:31:39,190 --> 00:31:46,870 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. 299 00:31:46,870 --> 00:31:52,030 For example, typically in English we say that the past is behind in the future as a friend. 300 00:31:52,030 --> 00:31:58,240 And if you and according to some cognitive scientists, the basis of that is a walking metaphor. 301 00:31:58,240 --> 00:32:00,820 You'll walk to the front, you move towards something, 302 00:32:00,820 --> 00:32:08,950 and there's nothing obvious about time or the past or future in these cultural practises for the immediate South American tribe. 303 00:32:08,950 --> 00:32:15,540 Past is in front and future is behind. And the reason is that you know what is in front of you. 304 00:32:15,540 --> 00:32:21,900 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. 305 00:32:21,900 --> 00:32:30,300 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, 306 00:32:30,300 --> 00:32:36,870 which is therefore is one which is lost behind whatever the theoretical structure of future. 307 00:32:36,870 --> 00:32:41,070 One simple fact seems to be the future, a domain which we do not know anything about. 308 00:32:41,070 --> 00:32:49,680 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. 309 00:32:49,680 --> 00:32:57,340 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. 310 00:32:57,340 --> 00:33:01,350 Even lighting systems influence ideas of past and the future. 311 00:33:01,350 --> 00:33:08,400 And for example, in English, the past is often represented as left word and the future as the right word. 312 00:33:08,400 --> 00:33:13,830 And the argument has been that it is because we write from left to right in order to learn Hebrew. 313 00:33:13,830 --> 00:33:21,720 The past is right and future has left word because that are the opposite direction in Mandarin, pasta, zabo and futureless below. 314 00:33:21,720 --> 00:33:27,470 And so there are all kinds of ways of talking about the past. Now, one might question the importance of these practises. 315 00:33:27,470 --> 00:33:34,440 It just seemed like linguistic practises of kind of reference to certain kinds of ideas which are present in the mind. 316 00:33:34,440 --> 00:33:41,010 But I'll give an example to show how much these linguistic practises of writing actually influence our historical consciousness. 317 00:33:41,010 --> 00:33:46,050 And experiment of a well known experiment illustrates this. 318 00:33:46,050 --> 00:33:55,530 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. 319 00:33:55,530 --> 00:34:02,070 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. 320 00:34:02,070 --> 00:34:05,850 And when you ask people to order them, 321 00:34:05,850 --> 00:34:13,230 it was found that English language speakers lay the three objects in an order from left to right in the following manner, 322 00:34:13,230 --> 00:34:19,410 first until banana, then the banana, and then the half eaten banana in the last. 323 00:34:19,410 --> 00:34:25,200 So you can see how the that is a kind of an ordering of a particular process of a 324 00:34:25,200 --> 00:34:30,780 temporal process which is represented in the viewer that you keep them spatially. 325 00:34:30,780 --> 00:34:38,040 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. 326 00:34:38,040 --> 00:34:41,760 However, they found Hebrew speakers lay them out from left, 327 00:34:41,760 --> 00:34:50,010 right to left in exactly the opposite order for English speakers of the objects in the direction of time as moving towards a future. 328 00:34:50,010 --> 00:34:55,500 But as it is the reverse for Hebrew speakers now, such modes of specialisation is very common. 329 00:34:55,500 --> 00:34:58,920 But what is special to this process in the context of history? 330 00:34:58,920 --> 00:35:08,970 So the point that specialisation of time is a problem is is true across a very common problem of human call, not a problem. 331 00:35:08,970 --> 00:35:12,990 It's part of the above. It's a problem of common feature of human cognition. 332 00:35:12,990 --> 00:35:17,070 But what is special to this process in the context of history now? 333 00:35:17,070 --> 00:35:22,960 One of I think the answer I'm going to give here, which might be you don't, 334 00:35:22,960 --> 00:35:28,620 which probably needs a lot more argument than I can given the remaining few minutes, 335 00:35:28,620 --> 00:35:37,290 is that the past and time in history become specialised into the of the specialisation is not just about the kind 336 00:35:37,290 --> 00:35:46,200 of linguistic examples we saw or the reference to the world as we saw with the tribal pointing to the Hill. 337 00:35:46,200 --> 00:35:54,340 But the passage of time in history becomes specialised into the socio the Boston time of histories becomes legend, 338 00:35:54,340 --> 00:35:57,360 the everyday social of these groups. 339 00:35:57,360 --> 00:36:04,650 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. 340 00:36:04,650 --> 00:36:09,630 So what I would do in the remaining few minutes is to briefly describe the work by 341 00:36:09,630 --> 00:36:14,740 Gopal Guru and myself described in our new book Experience Constant Everyday Social. 342 00:36:14,740 --> 00:36:20,880 Well, not so huge since the twenty nineteen that we formulate a model of social ontology, 343 00:36:20,880 --> 00:36:25,020 one that attempts to capture the uniqueness of Asian and African societies. 344 00:36:25,020 --> 00:36:32,670 And an important aspect of a formulation is that the social is not just an abstract term in a sense like the past, 345 00:36:32,670 --> 00:36:36,360 but one that is sensorially experienced. 346 00:36:36,360 --> 00:36:43,650 We consider the many examples through many examples of nature of the formation of the groups and the experience of Venus, 347 00:36:43,650 --> 00:36:48,300 how the groups come together, how are social challenges of different people, 348 00:36:48,300 --> 00:36:56,010 how are they formed and what is the relationship between the conceptual, social and this particular human process? 349 00:36:56,010 --> 00:37:00,810 Both these points with the everyday social experience aspect of abstract terms 350 00:37:00,810 --> 00:37:05,160 as well as the creation of Venus are relevant for the questions I began with. 351 00:37:05,160 --> 00:37:10,830 What is the sense of me that is present when we use the term of history? 352 00:37:10,830 --> 00:37:15,050 How do histories bring a sense of belongingness in a group of people to make it most? 353 00:37:15,050 --> 00:37:25,120 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? 354 00:37:25,120 --> 00:37:28,390 And that's our approach to the ontology of the social. 355 00:37:28,390 --> 00:37:37,270 Give us a framework to understand how we sensorially access the past or at least talk as if it is a real experience. 356 00:37:37,270 --> 00:37:44,650 So let me begin with a simple characterisation of the very social, as we describe in our book. 357 00:37:44,650 --> 00:37:54,570 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, 358 00:37:54,570 --> 00:37:59,820 as well as many, many more examples to illustrate what we are trying to say. 359 00:37:59,820 --> 00:38:06,360 So I'm just going to use one example of that to show you how our notions of, you know, 360 00:38:06,360 --> 00:38:11,880 responding sensorially to the abstract are often formed in very interesting ways. 361 00:38:11,880 --> 00:38:16,410 So what we describe is this the everyday association. 362 00:38:16,410 --> 00:38:20,310 And by that we begin with the very non-technical definition. 363 00:38:20,310 --> 00:38:24,870 It consists of the social realities of housewives meets children, women in the market, 364 00:38:24,870 --> 00:38:30,900 sanitation workers, interaction on small shops, and these little eating joints, auto drivers, 365 00:38:30,900 --> 00:38:34,830 public door-To-Door countless everyday things and processes around this, 366 00:38:34,830 --> 00:38:42,990 which is a collage of experiences which occur in rural and urban areas, inside and outside houses, within and without institutions. 367 00:38:42,990 --> 00:38:48,450 It most important point to begin with why we begin with this point is because of this it 368 00:38:48,450 --> 00:38:54,900 captures the way by which the first expediencies of the social experience and articulated. 369 00:38:54,900 --> 00:39:00,900 We learn about the idea of the social. We learn about the experience of the social, not through our engagement, 370 00:39:00,900 --> 00:39:08,520 but that valse set out social order and social structures, but through our engagement in our everyday social. 371 00:39:08,520 --> 00:39:13,350 Many of the modes of understanding the social begin to influence the idea of the social 372 00:39:13,350 --> 00:39:18,300 in the larger structural sense that these experiences are the social influence, 373 00:39:18,300 --> 00:39:24,870 how the sense of the social gets formed in categories such as nation, religion, caste and so on. 374 00:39:24,870 --> 00:39:30,000 So these experiences form an awareness of the experience of the social and influence, 375 00:39:30,000 --> 00:39:34,770 the way individuals interact with the impersonal or the institutional social. 376 00:39:34,770 --> 00:39:54,930 So how does one act? I think we're missing your sound. 377 00:39:54,930 --> 00:40:01,530 This post comes from the everyday practises of the social within the family, with friends and in schools, 378 00:40:01,530 --> 00:40:06,090 even as children, we are completely immersed in narratives of the past, time and history. 379 00:40:06,090 --> 00:40:13,740 We begin to form ideas, not just ideas of identity or our place within the society, 380 00:40:13,740 --> 00:40:19,140 but also Whig ideas of the notion of history in this everyday socialisation. 381 00:40:19,140 --> 00:40:27,090 But how do these experiences of what we could call an everyday history relate to the ontologically questions about history? 382 00:40:27,090 --> 00:40:30,390 Let me start with the example of the solution. What is the ontology of the solution? 383 00:40:30,390 --> 00:40:35,940 Is that even something called the social, you know, radical departure from abstract conceptualisation of the solution? 384 00:40:35,940 --> 00:40:40,350 We draw upon the empirical experiences in the Indian context to make the argument 385 00:40:40,350 --> 00:40:45,210 that the solution is sensorially access or at least thought to be sensory. 386 00:40:45,210 --> 00:40:49,680 So again, I give you these examples and a quote from the book. 387 00:40:49,680 --> 00:40:55,620 So the lived experience of the social is made up of sensations which we perceive to stand for the social. 388 00:40:55,620 --> 00:40:58,590 So instead of asking what kind of an entity the socialist, 389 00:40:58,590 --> 00:41:07,020 you ask by asking how the social is perceived at point, which has a very direct analogy with the past. 390 00:41:07,020 --> 00:41:18,330 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. 391 00:41:18,330 --> 00:41:48,740 The social. Odd in the way we formulated, but if we give this example and give you one, 392 00:41:48,740 --> 00:41:56,660 I just talk about one example of sense of smell and touch to illustrate how we set up this argument. 393 00:41:56,660 --> 00:42:01,520 First, there is a sense of seeing cutting, spending, taxing and hitting the social. 394 00:42:01,520 --> 00:42:07,100 So consider that many different ways in which our sense of smell continuously refers to the social. 395 00:42:07,100 --> 00:42:12,860 We define communities by constantly using our sensory capacity of smell in the Indian context. 396 00:42:12,860 --> 00:42:18,470 The examples are numerous, uncountable and endemic to the way we understand communities. 397 00:42:18,470 --> 00:42:22,130 India is not just a land of a thousand mutinies or a million gods. 398 00:42:22,130 --> 00:42:24,620 It's also a land of millions smeltz. 399 00:42:24,620 --> 00:42:42,850 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. 400 00:42:42,850 --> 00:42:55,000 Professor, I think we've I think we've lost your audio again. 401 00:42:55,000 --> 00:43:03,190 Qualities like mustard oil and coconut oil, smells, perfumes, like it or not, the USA are all used to refer to the ocean. 402 00:43:03,190 --> 00:43:09,580 Also, as we point out, the smell of garbage is a very important perceptual indicator of a different social. 403 00:43:09,580 --> 00:43:14,530 So the scavenging social is defined by the smell of sewage and garbage, 404 00:43:14,530 --> 00:43:23,450 that there are very deep engagement and interactions with these kinds of smells and other other sensory experiences. 405 00:43:23,450 --> 00:43:27,970 For example, the pollution that arises from that is also relevant for smell. 406 00:43:27,970 --> 00:43:33,640 Thus it was that smelling corpses, for example, would cause ritual pollution for Brandon's asthma. 407 00:43:33,640 --> 00:43:40,920 Just touch it. So smell assumes that significance in the conditions of the cultural asymmetries. 408 00:43:40,920 --> 00:43:43,840 You know, many examples in India, for example, Gujarat, 409 00:43:43,840 --> 00:43:49,630 the owners of houses in Mumbai are notoriously famous for not giving their houses for rent to non vegetarians. 410 00:43:49,630 --> 00:43:52,600 And there are many such examples in South India. 411 00:43:52,600 --> 00:43:58,280 And there are also examples of the Bengali uppercuts being denied houses for rent on the grounds of the fish. 412 00:43:58,280 --> 00:44:03,820 A dominant reason is that the smell associated with cooking fish or meat as well as complex. 413 00:44:03,820 --> 00:44:08,410 It also has very complex ontological beliefs about smells such as the belief that the smell 414 00:44:08,410 --> 00:44:14,560 has become part of the walls of the house and cannot be removed through such processes. 415 00:44:14,560 --> 00:44:21,730 Groups become spatial solutions where people are associated with particular smell will not be allowed to stay. 416 00:44:21,730 --> 00:44:30,580 Smell gets ghettoised and specialised much before people got smells associated with Zeins begin to define the nature of the community, 417 00:44:30,580 --> 00:44:37,000 that there are many indications of the nature of smell and the concomitant experience of the everyday social. 418 00:44:37,000 --> 00:44:44,380 Then the social is experience through this. Then the nature of this sensation will also influence the nature of the social. 419 00:44:44,380 --> 00:44:52,990 And very interestingly, as an anthropologist, Makua points out that the nature of smell becomes associated with qualities such as 420 00:44:52,990 --> 00:45:00,640 moral and aesthetic qualities in these many traditions which write about these in Asian, 421 00:45:00,640 --> 00:45:03,310 in Asian philosophical and cultural traditions. 422 00:45:03,310 --> 00:45:14,170 For example, Macu points out that suffering and impermanence, diseases, poverty, fowl, food, etc. and I tend to smell quite bad. 423 00:45:14,170 --> 00:45:22,060 So but these concepts smell bad, suffering smells bad, impermanence does smells bad, poverty smells bad. 424 00:45:22,060 --> 00:45:25,060 And given the dominance of the notion of carmin these traditions, 425 00:45:25,060 --> 00:45:34,510 it's not perhaps not a surprise to know that in the words of one smell indicates one's karmic past and in nature. 426 00:45:34,510 --> 00:45:44,620 So it has a moral quality which becomes which we discuss in a very in an example of the smell in public spaces, 427 00:45:44,620 --> 00:45:51,010 smell associated of the labour, the smell of sweat and so on. 428 00:45:51,010 --> 00:45:55,450 So what I would say very quickly to conclude this point is that such a metaphysical 429 00:45:55,450 --> 00:46:00,400 position about smell informs understanding of smell and the everyday social world. 430 00:46:00,400 --> 00:46:06,010 It's no longer olfactory smell, but a social smell which does not include olfactory sense. 431 00:46:06,010 --> 00:46:14,170 In fact, one from these examples, you could argue that smell becomes a vehicle for encoding, sustaining and transmitting notions of the ocean. 432 00:46:14,170 --> 00:46:20,680 For example, certain groups traditionally associated with scavenging sometimes are treated as if they continue to carry that smell, 433 00:46:20,680 --> 00:46:24,160 even when they are well-to-do citizens doing various other jobs. 434 00:46:24,160 --> 00:46:29,590 One could claim that they carry the smell as part of the stereotyping and the attempt of humiliation. 435 00:46:29,590 --> 00:46:35,080 So they are when people use smell as a category to categorise the communities, 436 00:46:35,080 --> 00:46:42,070 they are in essence saying that the group comes into being as a group because of social smell associated with that sociality. 437 00:46:42,070 --> 00:46:48,160 And that is another way to perceive this ocean and as an important way by which the social is experienced by us. 438 00:46:48,160 --> 00:46:54,310 The sociality of cost is primarily through the sensation and repulsion of what we call as social touch. 439 00:46:54,310 --> 00:46:58,960 When the people of the same caste that each other, there is a different sense of touch which we love and care. 440 00:46:58,960 --> 00:47:00,910 But an upper class such as the lower class. 441 00:47:00,910 --> 00:47:08,530 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? 442 00:47:08,530 --> 00:47:13,870 So notions of that range from not touching some human beings or not putting your museum pieces. 443 00:47:13,870 --> 00:47:22,660 So we actually discussed this much more extensively on the phenomenology in Archaeology of Touch in the book on the cognitive. 444 00:47:22,660 --> 00:47:27,580 But you could see what we are trying to do here is to say that the collective 445 00:47:27,580 --> 00:47:32,110 experience in many situations has a lot to do with the nature of touch with jazz, 446 00:47:32,110 --> 00:47:40,690 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, 447 00:47:40,690 --> 00:47:47,620 all kinds of cultural practises and the formulation of conceptual world, which makes sense of these practises, 448 00:47:47,620 --> 00:47:54,600 including questions of what is social and what is time and what is the boss are influenced by these views on simple. 449 00:47:54,600 --> 00:48:07,440 Things like smell and touch, so and of course, it is taken up most powerfully and perhaps most egregiously in the context of untouchability, 450 00:48:07,440 --> 00:48:14,640 where you have a completely different metaphysics of the very idea of touch and not touching somebody else. 451 00:48:14,640 --> 00:48:25,260 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, 452 00:48:25,260 --> 00:48:31,530 motivation and desires of individuals. The phenomenon of social touch is based on an ontology of touch. 453 00:48:31,530 --> 00:48:37,320 And here is where phenomena, the phenomenon of the past, the ontology of the past, 454 00:48:37,320 --> 00:48:42,000 is very closely linked to what I'm going to say here in the everyday social that 455 00:48:42,000 --> 00:48:46,890 goes in so many ways is exemplified in Hindu religious practises and syncretic in 456 00:48:46,890 --> 00:48:51,630 other religious practises to disastrous to the practises and rituals around touchin 457 00:48:51,630 --> 00:48:58,320 and the constant engagement with questions of touching God's time as a God, 458 00:48:58,320 --> 00:49:19,590 of course, which is a very different way of looking at this whole thing. Professor, I think you sound we've lost it again. 459 00:49:19,590 --> 00:49:23,250 Yeah, sorry, yeah, can you hear me now? 460 00:49:23,250 --> 00:49:31,380 Yes, perfectly, yeah, yeah. So I'm coming to the end of this just a couple of minutes, so. 461 00:49:31,380 --> 00:49:36,510 Yeah. So social touch is not the touch of one individual or another, not the touch of one hand on another. 462 00:49:36,510 --> 00:49:40,830 It's a touch of the social on us and our touch on the social. 463 00:49:40,830 --> 00:49:56,820 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 464 00:49:56,820 --> 00:50:06,060 brief introduction to the kind of ideas of the engi of the experience of the social and the abstract sense of the social. 465 00:50:06,060 --> 00:50:10,980 Let's see how this extends into the the first arguments that I began with. 466 00:50:10,980 --> 00:50:15,810 So the basic argument is this history is an integral part of the everyday social, 467 00:50:15,810 --> 00:50:22,680 as we began with, and that as gave examples, that is the baby formulate a sense of history. 468 00:50:22,680 --> 00:50:29,660 But yet again, I want to clarify again that I'm not getting into the dispute about which kind of history 469 00:50:29,660 --> 00:50:35,400 is that academic part of history or that the many different branches of history and so on. 470 00:50:35,400 --> 00:50:42,400 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. 471 00:50:42,400 --> 00:50:48,000 The everyday practises also embody social characteristics of the everyday social. 472 00:50:48,000 --> 00:50:54,360 For example, in the book we discuss four important characteristics. The very important first one is about Venus. 473 00:50:54,360 --> 00:51:02,370 What is it about the nature of the social that produces the question of identities, of group identities and notions of saying belongingness. 474 00:51:02,370 --> 00:51:09,540 And if you don't want to use terms around identity, the notion of belonging to something, that notion of Venus. 475 00:51:09,540 --> 00:51:16,020 And then the second point is about authority, which is produced through this this invisible social. 476 00:51:16,020 --> 00:51:20,460 And the third part, which is very important to the everyday social, is a production of time, 477 00:51:20,460 --> 00:51:26,130 its own, its own examples of time, its own ontologies and characteristics of time. 478 00:51:26,130 --> 00:51:29,100 And that's another chapter we talk about in that example. 479 00:51:29,100 --> 00:51:35,040 And then finally, of course, in ethics of Social, which becomes a question of ethics, of historicism. 480 00:51:35,040 --> 00:51:43,530 Thus historical consciousness goes hand in hand with the consciousness of the social and then the social is seen to be sensorially accessible. 481 00:51:43,530 --> 00:51:52,800 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. 482 00:51:52,800 --> 00:51:56,100 It's a history that's discovered and produced constantly. 483 00:51:56,100 --> 00:52:01,680 Historical consciousness is a necessary requirement for the protection of social consciousness and the historical, 484 00:52:01,680 --> 00:52:07,230 which is immersed in an ontology of the past and time is specialised into the everyday social. 485 00:52:07,230 --> 00:52:08,640 In so doing, 486 00:52:08,640 --> 00:52:22,200 it enables the historical to be sensorially accessible in the way the social becomes accessible through the sense of through the senses as described. 487 00:52:22,200 --> 00:52:28,950 And I just stop here so that you will have some time for a few questions. 488 00:52:28,950 --> 00:52:43,710 But the final part of this to conclude the much larger argument is to show how the hyperreality of the past is actually produced. 489 00:52:43,710 --> 00:52:54,440 I come from. We professor, we've just lost the very end. 490 00:52:54,440 --> 00:53:04,870 Of your lecture. So much for allowing me to share these ideas with you. 491 00:53:04,870 --> 00:53:06,155 Uh.