On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 at 21:38, Nagaraj Paturi <nagarajpaturi@gmail.com> wrote:

The category 'western' as a label for a certain worldview , a certain approach to understanding things has been used widely in the academic studies world over.

I know, and it's a curse.

In my view, it's impossible to use this category without rapidly descending into jingoistic language or implications. That's why I never use it.

I find Madhav's contrasting terms, westernized-indian and indianized-westerner fun and thought-provoking. What I draw from this is, again, that using "west" as a meaningful category to refer to something cultural is never going to help. The term is useful for the clash-of-civilizations type of narrative, that has goals other than deepening understanding, but not for serious work by serious people.

In my thinking and writing in recent years I say "European and North American" if I want to refer to ideas or people from Europe and N. America. I make it specifically geographical, as Camillo too suggests. To do otherwise is to essentialize harmfully, to be Toynbee redivivus, heaven forbid.

Best,

PS,

Jack Goody, 2005:

Following the lead of Malthus, many demographers, like other social scientists, have drawn a sharp distinction between the European and non-European family systems, particularly those of Asia. But it is often an error to oppose the West and the Rest in a categorical manner, as large numbers of anthropologists, sociologists and historians continue to do. That leads to the kind of mistakes Malthus made about China. Comparable errors have been made by anthropologists—Durkheim treating the Chinese as exemplars of ‘primitive classification’, Dumont positing a decisive break between a hierarchical India and a more egalitarian West, or Lévi-Strauss bracketing early Chinese with Australian marriage systems.

Such positions have done considerable harm to social and historical studies.