“The
anthropological endeavour, at least on one reading, is an attempt to be
attentive both to the unfolding of everyday life and to the
translational practices that enable legibility across difference. How,
in a world that traffics in mobilities, boundaries and differences, can
we grapple with ideas and concepts whose theoretical genealogies are
entangled with histories of Empire and which continue to live in
everyday world-making practices and the disciplinary knowledges that
seek to understand them? How might our concepts better honour the
diverse world-making practices we come to know? The authors of this
collection address an overreliance in Anthropology on concepts that
reify and fix complex phenomena. They offer us a concept of
‘shadowlands’ to describe those shifting spaces that lie beyond, just
out of reach of, the concrete facts of dispossessions and erasures of
historical and contemporary global modernities, and to think beyond the
lexicons of Euromodern concepts and the ideas they constellate.”
