Occasional Lecture by Martin Fuchs on 15-3-2016

FORUM ON CONTEMPORARY THEORY
A Member of the Consortium of Humanities Centers & Institutes(CHCI)
C-304 Siddhi Vinayak Complex,
Behind Baroda Railway Station (Alkapuri Side)
Faramji Road, Baroda-390007
Tel: (0265) 2320870; E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.fctworld.org
Invitation
Occasional Lecture
“Recognition across Difference:
Conceptual Considerations against an Indian Background”
Topic of the Lecture :
Speaker : Martin
Fuchs
Professor for Indian Religious History
Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies
University of Erfurt, Germany
Date and Time:
15 March 2016 at 11:30 am
Venue:
Centre for Contemporary Theory
C-304 Siddhi Vinayak Complex,
Behind Baroda Railway Station (Alkapuri Side)
Faramji Road, Baroda-390007
A Summary of the Lecture (Prepared by Martin Fuchs)
The paper addresses central requirements of recognition from a sociological and inter-cultural perspective. It emphasizes in particular the
core importance of face-to-face reciprocity in relations of recognition and the significance of cultural, especially value, differences for any
attempt at conceptualizing recognition; this includes differences in the way in which recognition is articulated. Taking the issues faced by
Dalits in India, and accounting for the contextual complexities of these issues, the paper discusses critically several significant aspects of
Axel Honneth’s approach to the question of recognition. Honneth’s approach does not account appropriately for the diversity of value
systems within society, and the contentions between them, and leaves tensions between universalist morals and value particularity
unresolved. Moreover, development regarding moral and ethical concepts should not be conflated with the experience of recognition.
Addressing modal diversities of recognition, the paper further examines recognition in the midst of cultural and evaluative diversities. It
considers idiomatic specificities of articulating recognition; reflects, with a view to Indian historical experiences, constellations in which
different idioms coexist and relate to each other; and raises the question what happens in cases where one of the available idioms suggests
the refusal of recognition of others. The paper ends with considerations regarding the universalistic thrust of theories of social recognition.
It contends that while universalistic in its ambition, the struggle for recognition must not be universal in its form. The universal cannot be
taken to represent some state beyond cultures; rather we encounter a plurality of universalisms which grow out of particular cultural
contexts. These have to prove their universal, or at least their translocal, validity.
About the Speaker
Martin Fuchs holds the Professorship for Indian Religious History at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies,
University of Erfurt, Germany. Trained in both Anthropology and Sociology he has taught at universities in Germany, Switzerland, Hungary
and New Zealand. His research interests include cultural and social theory, normative conflicts and social recognition, urban anthropology,
social movements and religious individualization. His regional focus is on India (among others, fieldwork in Dharavi, Mumbai).
His books include Theorie und Verfremdung. Max Weber, Louis Dumont und die Analyse der indischen Gesellschaft [Theory and Othering: Max
Weber, Louis Dumont and the Analysis of Indian Society, 1988], Kultur, soziale Praxis, Text. Die Krise der ethnographischen Repräsentation
[Culture, Social Praxis, Text. The Crisis of Ethnographic Representation edited together with Eberhard Berg, 1993], India and Modernity:
Decentring Western Perspectives, special issue of Thesis Eleven, no. 39, November 1994 (Guest Editor) ,Kampf um Differenz. Repräsentation,
Subjektivität und soziale Bewegungen - Das Beispiel Indien [Struggle over Difference: Representation, Subjectivity and Social Movments – The
Example of India, 1999], Konfigurationen der Moderne. Diskurse zu Indien [Configurations of Modernity. Discourses on India edited together
with Antje Linkenbach and Shalini Randeria, special volume of Soziale Welt , 2004] and Religious Individualisation, special issue of Religion,
vol. 45 (3), 2015 guest edited with Jörg Rüpke. He has also written on Ambedkar's Buddhism and the Dalit Issue( in Charisma and Canon:
Essays on the Religious History of the Indian Subcontinent, 2001), Governmentality and the Agency of Slum Dwellers ( in Urbanization and
Governance in India, 2005) and on Religious Individualisation ( in Religious Individualisation, special issue of Religion, vol. 45 (3), 2015).

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