Reviews for An Archaeology of Capitalism

The average rating for An Archaeology of Capitalism based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-22 00:00:00 Medley Freedom One criticism levelled against Said is that he speaks little about orientalisms besides the English and French and little on Orients besides the Arab world. A very fair criticism. Ronald Inden has hence taken it upon him to offer a Saidian critique on orientalism in South Asia. Inden lends himself in the process out to the very issue with Saidianism, the danger of gliding into primordialism and territorialism and offering weapons into the hands of regional right wings. He chooses a few aspects of India and how British scholars, intellectuals, and writers from the mid-18th century to the present and how liberalism, evangelism (and Christian idealism), and universalism have distorted thought and practice in India to suit the colonial narrative of a muddled up, navel gazing, collectivist or herd-minded, spiritualist East. However in the very choosing of these aspects of Caste, Hinduism, the Indian village, and traditional Kingship, not only he betrays an arbitrariness but also an unintentional ally-ship with the Cultural Nationalist interpretation of India's history. Inden's weakest chapter is on Hinduism. Inden is right in delineating the complex Western views on Indian thought so much so that the Saidian proposition cannot even stand. His strongest section is certainly that on kingship; this is certainly worth-reading. Here too he fails royally in giving context to the various scholars who sought to understand Premodern power structures and their motivations in the attempts to picture them. Also, what was the present of these orientalists? And of India? These threads are left loose.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-10-08 00:00:00 Kraig Hinson The long and the short of it is that this book applies Edward Said's ideas about Orientalism to India, and particularly to the "essentialized" view of India that was developed by mostly British Orientalists during the age of empire. I always try to be open-minded about post-colonial theory, but I couldn't read this book without noticing all of the remarkable contradictions in the enterprise.