Close to Experience

Our life is saturated with concepts. They shape our thoughts, mediate our actions, and define the way we relate to the world. They take hold of us and become part of our lived common sense. This volume explores concepts that are close to experience, embedded in our everyday world, rather than abstract notions that are experience-distant.Concepts are not static or fixed but dynamic and flexible. The volume tracks the way concepts take on new forms, acquiring distinct meanings in different contexts, and the way these mutations open up specific social and political worlds. How do people think of honour and dignity, or humiliation and shame, not as abstract concepts, but as felt emotions in everyday life, in distinct historical situations? How are relationships of care and intimacy, solidarity and camaraderie, forged through words, expressed in language and gestures? How are notions of development and growth, modernisation and progress conceptualised in the everyday language of different social groups? This fascinating volume offers a set of richly textured essays addressing such questions, persuading us to look carefully at concepts that are close to experience and their complex relationship to meta concepts of social analysis.The book will be indispensable for scholars, teachers and researchers of Historical Sociology, History, Anthropology, Political Economy, Political Sociology, Sociology, Political Theory, Politics, Media and Cultural Studies, and Development Studies.

Neeladri Bhattacharya, Visiting Professor, Ashoka University, India. Bhattacharya previously taught at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His recent publications include: The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World, (2018); with Ramin Jahanbegloo and Romila Thapar, Talking History: Conversations with Romila Thapar (2017); co-edited with Joy Pachuau, Landscape, Culture and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India (2018).Rajeev Bhargava, Honorary Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Society; Director, Parekh Institute of Indian Thought, CSDS. Rajeev Bhargava has been at the Centre since 2005 and is currently the director of its newly launched Institute of Indian Thought.