1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910786622303321

Autore

Sartori Andrew

Titolo

Bengal in Global Concept History : Culturalism in the Age of Capital / / Andrew Sartori

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago : , : University of Chicago Press, , [2009]

©2008

ISBN

0-226-73486-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (288 p.)

Collana

Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning

Disciplina

954.14

Soggetti

Bengal (India) - Civilization

Culture - Economic aspects - Bengal - India

Regions & Countries - Asia & the Middle East

History & Archaeology

South Asia

Bengal (India) Civilization

Bengal (India) Historiography

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- CHAPTER ONE. Bengali "Culture" as a Historical Problem -- CHAPTER TWO. Culture as a Global Concept -- CHAPTER THREE. Bengali Liberalism and British Empire -- CHAPTER FOUR. Hinduism as Culture -- CHAPTER FIVE. The Conceptual Structure of an Indigenist Nationalism -- CHAPTER SIX. Reification, Rarification, and Radicalization -- CONCLUSION. Universalistic Particularisms and Parochial Cosmopolitanisms -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Today people all over the globe invoke the concept of culture to make sense of their world, their social interactions, and themselves. But how did the culture concept become so ubiquitous? In this ambitious study, Andrew Sartori closely examines the history of political and intellectual life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal to show how the concept can take on a life of its own in different contexts. Sartori weaves the narrative of Bengal's embrace of culturalism into a worldwide history of the concept, from its origins in eighteenth-century



Germany, through its adoption in England in the early 1800s, to its appearance in distinct local guises across the non-Western world. The impetus for the concept's dissemination was capitalism, Sartori argues, as its spread across the globe initiated the need to celebrate the local and the communal. Therefore, Sartori concludes, the use of the culture concept in non-Western sites was driven not by slavish imitation of colonizing powers, but by the same problems that repeatedly followed the advance of modern capitalism. This remarkable interdisciplinary study will be of significant interest to historians and anthropologists, as well as scholars of South Asia and colonialism.