Faculty of Social Sciences at South Asian University
In collaboration with the Department of Sociology
Present
Contributions to Contemporary Knowledge - 2015
Gandhi as a Global Thinker:
Legacies of the Anti-Colonial Revolution
By
Keith Hart
Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology
Department of International Development
London School of Economics
And
International Director
Human Economy Program
University of Pretoria, South Africa
Date and Time:
Thursday, 29 January 2015; 06.00 PM
Venue:
Multipurpose Hall
India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi
Abstract of lecture: The new human universal is not an idea; it is 7 billion of us searching for ways of living together on this planet. In order to do so we must be able to conceptualise world society as something that each of us can relate to meaningfully. Global thinking is in short supply and I look for it in key moments of world society’s formation.
Europeans launched world society in the nineteenth century when they coerced the peoples of the planet into joining their colonial empires. As a result, by 1900 Europeans controlled 80% of the inhabited land. The main event of the twentieth century was the anti-colonial revolution, when colonised peoples sought to establish their own independent relationship to world society.
Hart takes two main sources as exemplary of this movement: three New World Panafricanists (W E B Dubois, C L R James and Frantz Fanon) and Mohandas K Gandhi. In the early twentieth century, Panafricanism, fuelled by resistance to racism and was the most inclusive political movement in the world. Gandhi fed indirectly off these currents during his two decades in South Africa.
Kant claimed for himself a Copernican revolution in metaphysics. “Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects… (but what) if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge?” Understanding must begin not with the empirical existence of objects, but with the reasoning embedded in all the judgments each of us has made. So the world is inside each of us as much as it is out there. One definition of ‘world’ is ‘all that relates to or affects the life of a person’. Our task is to bring the two poles together as subjective individuals who share the object world in common with the rest of humanity.
Gandhi’s critique of the modern state was devastating. He held that it disabled its citizens, subjecting mind and body to the control of professional experts, when the purpose of a civilization should be to enhance its members’ self-reliance. He proposed an anthropology based on two universal postulates: that every human being is a unique personality and as such participates with the rest of humanity in an encompassing whole. Between these extremes lie a great variety of associations. Gandhi settled on the village as the most appropriate social vehicle for human development.
The problem Gandhi confronted is crucial. If the world is devoid of meaning, then, being governed by remote impersonal forces known only to specially trained experts, leaves each of us feeling small, isolated and vulnerable. Yet, modern cultures tell us that we have significant personalities. In this context, how does one bridge the gap between a vast, unknowable world, which we experience as an external object, and a puny self, endowed with the subjective capacity to act alone or with others?
We must scale down the world, scale up the self or a combination of both. Traditionally this task was performed by religion, notably through prayer. Gandhi chose the village as the site of India’s renaissance because it had a social scale appropriate to self-respecting members of the civilization. Moreover, he devoted a large part of his philosophy and practice to building up the personal resources of individuals, not least his own. One aim of the lecture is to bring this project up to date.
About the speaker: Keith Hart is Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and International Director of the Human Economy Program at the University of Pretoria. He is an anthropologist by training and a self-taught economist who lives in Paris with his family. He also has a home in Durban, South Africa.
Hart studied classics and went on to explore the African diaspora in West Africa, North America, the Caribbean, Britain, France and South Africa. He has taught for a long time in Cambridge University, where he was Director of the African Studies Centre.
His interests include building a human economy; economic anthropology; money and finance; informal economy; African development; migration; national capitalism; the digital revolution in communications; social media; intellectual property and its discontents; the emergence of world society; world citizenship.
His recent books include Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today (2009), The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (2010) and People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis: Perspectives from the Global South (Vol. 1 in Berghahn’s Human Economy series), all co-edited volumes. He wrote Economic Anthropology (2011) with Chris Hann. He authored The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World (2000) and numerous papers. His next book, about African development in the twenty-first century, will be Africa: The Coming Revolution.
Invitations: If you would like to have an invitation to the lecture, please send a request with your name, postal address, email addresses to the following email addresses: sociology@sau.ac.in; mallika@sau.ac.in
For more information, please contact:
Mallika Shakya, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Samson George, Personal Secretary to the Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences
Telephone: +91-11-24122512-14; +91-11-24195000
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