%0 Journal Article
%T Inescapable Reflexivity for Social Science Research in India for Now: A Personal Dialogue with the Lived Contexts of Anthropology
%A Arnab Das
%J -
%D 2018
%X This is a reflexively critical account of the lived practices particularly of anthropology that might stand broadly valid as well for other social science disciplines in most of the Indian Universities except a few elite ones. This is because the ways the dominant discourses of institutional learning in postcolonial India¡ªmore particularly of £¿science¡® disciplines¡ªpersist as foreign to and outside our everyday lived realities that their disorienting consequences surface more pronouncedly and specifically in higher education. The writing materializes my becoming of a site of dialogues regarding why, how and what might be the urgent reflexivity about the ¨Ddecline narrative¡¬ in £¿social sciences¡®. The reflexive responses, nonetheless, are selective about the themes that I consider salient. They include: (a) how and why we need to accept our £¿reality¡® as £¿hybridity¡® that is assumed to complete and compete for the full circle of going global (£¿western¡®) and then to create the £¿real¡® differences in the research outcomes; (b) the reflexively critical journey beginning with where and how we stand in field research by merely £¿being there£¿; (c) how we might redraw the possibilities of social science in India and finally (d) why and how the ambivalence of hybrid in-betweenness might help us speaking out ourselves. Thus, we cannot escape how we, like most of the postcolonial nations, unwittingly moved to the stabilising singularity at pre-neoliberal order that hardly could disembed us from the enduring ground of reflexive everydayness, even at the rise of neoliberal unstable multitude.
%K Reflexivity
%K Social Science
%K Anthropology
%K Dialogue
%K Hybridity
%K Ambivalence
%K Postcolonial
%K Merely being there
%K Fieldwork
%K Knowing/Becoming
%K Neoliberal
%K Education
%U https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ijma/article/view/170860