> Last week I read an
>essay by Homi Bhabha where he mentioned that the "Indian historian Veena
>Das demands a historiography of the subaltern that displaces the paradigm
>of social actions as defined by primarily by rational action" (in
>"Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt") Sounds intriguing --
>anyone know of any works by the subaltern studies writers that fits the
>questions being asked here?
Adam,
The Subaltern School's Founder Ranajit Guha has long argued that historians have played little attention to the religious consciousness of rebellious peasants ( see Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Guha and Gayatri Spivak); there has been some criticism that the rebellions that subalternists may ascribe to spontaneous religious consciousness were actually inspired, if not organized, by self conscious leftist political parties. Irfan Habib and Bipan Chandra are likely to have voiced such criticism.
It has been told to me that a comparison of Bhaba and Michael Taussig on the question of mimicry in a colonial context is illuminating.
After having skimmed a couple of seemingly profound books, Elizabeth M Baeten The Magic Mirror: Myth's Abiding Power and Jon Krois' biography of Ernst Cassirer, I must say that what seems crucial for our discussion here is this philosopher's attempt to understand how the worse forms of barbaric political activity ("hero worship, highly ritualized activity, incantatory slogans, stylized images, and symbols evolking massive displays of raw emotion") would prove unassailable to reason. It is Cassirer's struggle over the return of seemingly anachronistic mythic thought, the structure of which he elaborated in the greatest detail, that seems to be a good stepping off point for this discussion.
Baeten also compares Cassirer to Roland Barthes. About the latter she writes:
"The mechanics of mythmaking are quite specific in Barthes' model. Myth is the elision of the historically determined and determinable character of the motivated signified in a second order semiological system or metalanguage." p.104
She walks the reader through Barthes' Mythologies before this pithy formulation (which I do not understand presently but it seems very interesting, no?), and then compares Barthes to Cassirer. But I only read the first 90 pages of the book when I was trying to get a handle on Cassirer's analysis of the mythic structure of race ideology as discussed in his book *The Myth of the State*.
I know Chuck G has read Cassirer based on some very stimulating messages he sent to LBO-Talk when it was still young. I have not done a study of Cassirer. Baeten's book is helpful--at least the first chapters that I read.
Yours, Rakesh