Mapping Oppositions: Enchanted Spaces and Modern Places

By critically considering colonial cultures and vernacular modernities in conjunction with each other, this special issue of Nepantla seeks to think through some of the settled stipulations of debate, inherited terms of dialogue, in discussions of colony and modernity. My short article forms part of this larger endeavor. It points toward the provision and the play of “enchanted” places and “modern” spaces at the heart of dominant “metageographies”—the sets of spatial imaginings and structured dispositions through which the world is sequestered and segmented, and the knowledge of these realms is orchestrated and ordered.¹

The cartographies of enchanted spaces in question have been shored up and shaped by the vision of a universal history. The topographies of modern places being discussed are animated and articulated by the provisions of historical progress.² Ever conjoint, these categories and conceptions have a broad provenance, a wide reach. Indeed, variously connected to colonial encounters, imperial entanglements, and global enmeshments, the resilient representations of such mappings have played a critical role in the imagination and the institution of both the modern disciplines and the contemporary world. Therefore, let me open these considerations by describing an academic conference—a learned symposium in an enchanted space, a modern place, Heidelberg.³

Overture

Heidelberg is a beautiful town with a character all its own. A place in history, it offers a rare site to discuss realms of knowledge and deliberate boundaries of disciplines. The marvelously restored Wissenschaftsforum, located at a quiet end of the Hauptstrasse, in the shadow of the Schloss (castle) that dominates the old town, overlooks the “philosopher's way” on the other side of the river Neckar. Here scholars of the sciences and savants of the humanities gather several times a year for colloquia and conferences. The early summer of 1997 was no different. In the third week of June, soon after the end of a workshop on plasticity in the physical sciences, scholars and students from far and near converged on Heidelberg to deliberate the contours, continuities, and changes in the study of state and society and religion and culture in eastern India.

The weather in Heidelberg is truly unpredictable. Even as the suitcases of the workshop participants were being unpacked, a cheerful sun gave way to grayness, and it began to drizzle on the university and tourist town. Shapeless and relentlessly dark clouds overwhelmed Heidelberg. Over the four days of the colloquium the drizzle turned into rain, and sometimes it poured. There were puddles in corners. There were streams on the streets. There was dank love in town. But nothing disturbed the calm purpose of the academics gathered in the Wissenschaftsforum.

The conference, I am happy to report, proceeded according to plan. Talks were delivered, presentations made, questions asked, points scored, and scores settled—not just in the seminar room but over the cold buffet at lunch, too. And variously happy and disgruntled seminarians and speakers mingled together in separate groups in the evenings over beer and wine. Don't get me wrong. It was the stuff that most well-organized conferences are made up of. Why then do I dilate on Heidelberg and the colloquium, since all that seems at stake are minor variations on a familiar theme? Actually, there is a purpose.

On the afternoon of the second day of the colloquium on eastern India, there were two immaculately presented papers. The first was on communication with ancestors among the Soara indigenous group, and the second was on ritual and reincarnation among the indigenous Gadabas. During the two presentations, I found myself thinking about the anthropologist's place as pioneer and traveler, emerging from modern places and traversing enchanted spaces.⁴

The first presentation on wall paintings in Soara huts—drawn to communicate with their ancestors—began with the invocation of a journey. This journey carried the scholars of the Soara way of life to their destination. The description of a five-hour trek through difficult terrain to reach...