Coordinators: Indrani Chatterjee (University of Virginia), Caley Charles Smith (Georgia College & State University), and Alexander Forte (NYU).
Overview
The goal of this pillar is to develop the study of Relationality as a first order phenomenon of history, as opposed to an after-thought. This amounts to taking the individual (or personal subject of the Enlightenment), and the very concept of the individual, as actually emerging from socio-cultural connections, and not simply existing within them. This includes relationships that have been characterized as virtuous or vicious hierarchies. We take it for granted that hierarchical relationships and attachments are intrinsically historical, worthy of study across multiple times and spatialized political formations in ways that allow us to negate latter-day essentialisms of ‘east’- ‘west’, First World- Third World. We understand that many of the texts we treat as ‘classical’ take such hierarchical social relations for granted while seeking to address the instabilities inherent in all such hierarchies. This, we assert, is the task of ancient sacrificial ‘ritual’ as much as it is of modern constitutions and elections – the task of taming, reordering and resettling hierarchies so that a common subjection to a consensus, itself a species of Relationality, is assured at the end. The scope of this project involves case-studies of early textual production in archaic Greece, political imagination in Vedic texts and later concepts of caste, and relationalities inherent in enslavement and abolition in the colonial period.
Guiding Questions
- How can a focus on Relationality more fully reveal the complexities of human institutions?
- Do normative approaches to (virtuous/vicious) hierarchical relationships foreclose a realistic appraisal of how these same relationships emerge and function historically?
- Can democracy emerge independently at various historical moments through a given set of relational preconditions?
Goals
- Develop an analytical framework that foregrounds Relationality, rather than the individual, as a starting point.
- Run a workshop on comparative relationality through NYU’s Comparative Antiquities Initiative.
- Organize a conference on political relationality through UVA’s Humanities Center and the Karsh Institute of Democracy.