Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincializing humanity or the Anthropocene and its challenges

In the First Person

José Neves and Marcos Cardão

The Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, an eminent figure in post-colonial and ‘subaltern studies’, author of Provincializing Europe – a book that has had widespread international repercussions, and currently a professor at the University of Chicago, is interviewed by the historians José Neves and Marcos Cardão.

Twenty years have passed since the publication of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, which gave academic prominence to the work of the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. Born in Calcutta in 1948, Chakrabarty obtained his Bachelor’s degree in India and his PhD in Australia, where he taught at university before moving to Chicago in the 1990s.

With the publication of Provincializing Europe, he popularised the idea that the terms used by social sciences to describe the world are inadequate for knowing the world. Even though they assume they can objectivise it, these sciences and their descriptions inevitably adopt a subjective point of view, the effects of which tend to be ignored. One of Chakrabarty’s most famous phrases, which would become a kind of slogan for his work, refers precisely to the fact that the social sciences are both ‘indispensable and inadequate’.

For Chakrabarty, the fact that social sciences ignore the effects of their own subjective perspective was also the result of an epistemic privilege afforded by their Western provenance. The power acquired by the main European forces through the modern and contemporary era allowed the knowledge produced by academic institutions to see itself as the voice of humanity and history itself – and not simply as one among other discourses that compose a plural and diverse world. Colonialism carved its path with gunpowder and on the back of the slave trade as well as through cultural and epistemic domination. As opposed to seeing Europe as an imagined future to which the rest of humanity was destined, Chakrabarty showed that the continent was just one of the world’s many provinces.

Rather than pointing a finger at the Eurocentric visions of the past that had been offered by his colleagues over the history of the discipline, Chakrabarty’s critique in Provincializing Europe posed new questions and challenges. According to his theories – as well as those of other scholars associated with post-colonial studies –, Eurocentrism is more than just a sin that social sciences should avoid if they want to produce better knowledge: it is endemic to those sciences. Even the concepts of ‘society’ and ‘social’ – or ‘humanity’ and human’ – convey particular (instead of universal) forms of identification, codification and interpretation of the real. Far from arising spontaneously anywhere or anytime, they are historical constructs that emerge from a particular context, giving shape to ideas and mentalities that are uncharacteristic of many people living outside of Europe. In short, even though social and human sciences aim to produce universal knowledge, the latter is necessarily particular to Western modernity, and to the time and space in which these sciences emerged.

Following Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics, and combining Marx and Heidegger’s philosophies in a novel way, Provincializing Europe can be understood first and foremost as the result of the shrewd path Chakrabarty had carefully set. Similarly to other members of the Subaltern Studies collective, it was with his empirical research on India that Chakrabarty was theoretically confronted with the limitations of the discipline – as if non-Western pasts resisted being domesticated by History’s foundational codes and concepts, and from this resistance a problem arose for which there was no other solution but to constantly develop it.

His research on the history of the Bengali working class led him to a series of dead ends, which he tried to tackle in Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940. That work showed him that History was a discipline with specific origins linked to modern Western thought and that even the more heterodox currents, such as Marxism, were too narrow to interpret both pre-modern European and non-Western pasts.

Pasts such as India’s summoned gods, spirits and natural elements that challenged the secularised interpretation proponed by Western thought. Founded on a division between on the one hand, what belonged to the ‘social’, ‘human’ and ‘real’ and, on the other hand, what belonged to ‘nature’, religiosity’ and ‘myth’, this knowledge revealed itself to be a situated form of knowledge – a culturally-determined way of conceiving, understanding and inhabiting the world, more than a correct way of knowing and interpreting it.

Without completely abandoning these questions, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s attention has more recently turned towards issues of climate change and the Anthropocene. The publication of ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, in the journal Critical Inquiry in 2009, and followed by other articles1, started a new chapter in his work, and guides the interview published below.

Pieter Bruegel, Spring, 1565
© Photo: Scala, Florence / Albertina, Vienna

JOSÉ NEVES AND MARCOS CARDÃO In 2009, you wrote an article that became highly debated: “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, which was published in the journal Critical Inquiry. How did you, a historian, become interested in this subject? Is it because you were initially a physicist? Or is it because you have lived for some time now in Australia, a place where these climate changes can be felt so dramatically?

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY One subject I studied in my undergraduate years was geology. It was one of my minors, so it was at a very introductory level. I always found geology fascinating. I still remember that when I moved to Canberra in Australia to do my PhD, I saw several geological ideas illustrated. In my Calcutta classroom, my geology teachers would talk about rocks, and how in rocks you can have folds and faults. But they would only draw diagrams on the blackboard to explain what a fold or a fault was. In Canberra, when you drive around a certain part of the city, going from north to south, there’s a point where you can see rocks exposed on both sides, and on the one side you see a fold, and on the other side you see a fault. And when I realized that these were what my Calcutta professors had been referring to, I said to myself, “Wow!”

I always used to say to friends in Australia in my early years that I wished I were a geologist, because then I would not miss home in the way I did. The whole planet would be a book to study. But I went to do my PhD in modern South Asian history. I was working on Bengal and Calcutta, so everything I read reminded me of home. And I rather wished, in my homesickness, that I wasn’t studying India, because if you’re homesick but are always watching, reading and thinking about the place you have left, it doubles your homesickness. That was why I would often joke and tell my friends that I just wished I were a geologist doing my PhD because then every country would be equally interesting. All countries are part of the Earth’s history. Therefore, when I discovered climate change and discovered Earth System science, it spoke to my early interests in Geology.

JN and MC How can historians rethink history in terms appropriate to the present situation? For instance, ‘deep history’ would be an option: but it would require training in scientific methods and create new challenges to historiography, namely through the possibility of writing history without a written record of the past, is that right?

DC Well, in part, we should remember there are already groups of historians called archaeologists and pre-historians. Even we, as historians of relatively recent pasts, don’t necessarily work from documents alone. If you look at historians of classical Greece and Rome, they use both texts and archaeological evidence. However, there are many societies without writing cultures, where all one has to go by is archaeology and pre-history. Then, beyond Archaeology, there is evolutionary history. Archaeological histories cover some thousands of years. And then there are evolutionary historians talking about Homo sapiens or hominins. These are all different ways of doing history, and allow for different kinds of questions. I think the closer you come to written history, human experience becomes very important. One of the assumptions in written history, according to Gadamer, is the continuity of human experience. If someone from the past said “peasants were angry because prices had risen”, then you assume that you already know what anger is and why anger in that context would be plausible. Because from your own experience, you know what it means to be angry, right? Thus, when you come to write history, there’s an assumption of a continuity of experience. But when you go back to evolutionary histories, you can’t assume this. You’re basically looking at the history of life and sometimes a genetic development will be more important than something else. So, what kind of questions do you ask? The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari gives an interesting example of large-scale histories that can shed light on present-day concerns. He shows that stone tools belonging to our ancestors – “our” meaning Homo sapiens, he speaks of the Genus Homo – suggest that they were mainly used for breaking bones. Why? Because the position of the Genus Homo was solidly in the middle of the food chain, so they had to wait until more powerful animals like lions and hyenas had had their fill, and only then would they go and break the bones of the cleaned out carcasses in order to eat the marrow. His argument is that the human ascent to the position of the top predator on the planet has not been at the speed of evolution. The speed of evolutionary change is slow and takes millions of years. In the time in which lions became majestic hunters, deer learnt to be very fast runners, so there was a balance between the hunter and the hunted. But human beings owe their position to cultural developments such as language, social bonds on larger and larger scales, and technology. All these things have changed much faster than evolutionary changes. Other species have not had time to adjust to humans: fish could have learned to recognise and avoid them, had they had the time, but they have not, and, hence we are able to hunt many species of fish out of existence. That is the kind of insight that ‘deep history’ can foster. As you become aware of this kind of expansion of vision, you realize that while deep historians are accounting for the past, they are doing so with very different methods and with very different questions in mind. Before – that is before I had developed an interest in climate change, I’d say yes, they’re doing ‘deep history’ in the Evolutionary biology department or in the Geology department, but it does not interest me. The climate question brings it all together, but without resolving the methodological differences.

“We have converted the whole world and life on it into simply resources for humans to flourish. But life did not flourish on this planet only so that humans would thrive.”

JN and MC As you mentioned, climate change challenges our ways of being and thinking. It questions the distinctions between natural and human histories and, according to your work, introduces a difference between the global and the planetary. How can climate changes invite us to move through contradictory figures of the human, in order to think of the human simultaneously as a geophysical force and as a political agent? How can we inhabit these two presents at the same time?

DC Well, think of the Coronavirus pandemic that we are tragically experiencing. It brings together the global and planetary but also illustrates their difference. The spread of the disease through human travel is part of global history; the increasing interface between humans and animals and birds – including wild ones – is also a matter of extractive capitalism and the increased demand for human habitat and consumption. All that is global. But what viruses do and the way they reproduce themselves belong to the history of biological life on this planet. Microbes are the majority form of life, both in numbers and weight. Viruses play very important roles in the history of life on this planet. They even take part in the production of atmospheric oxygen. They are a much, much older form of (semi-) life, while humans are very recent. Comprehending this crisis requires us to think of both global and planetary histories. And the latter is precisely what we are not used to doing, so we resist it and try to incorporate it all back into the familiar territory of the global.

I think we’re coming to a historical period, where our phenomenological capacities are being challenged. Thinking like a mountain, thinking as though you exist for 150,000 years, doesn’t come naturally to us. So here, I’m going back to Kant: we’re animals with particular ideas of time and space that are part of our hardwiring. We are dealing with a world that is now challenging those hardwired concepts. That was what I meant when I said that the work of retraining our imagination is needed, to see what the challenge requires us to see. To see, for example, that in the last 70 years we have demanded too much of the world. We have converted the whole world and life on it into simply resources for humans to flourish, and we’ve been mining, extracting, taking things from it. But, life did not flourish on this planet only so that humans would thrive.

JN e MC Does the politicisation of the Anthropocene debate not allow us to explore that imagination?

DC It assumes too much human sovereignty. Once you see the planet, it’s also about our creatureliness. The recent Australian fires are very unfortunate, but they’re a good example to think through.

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*Translated by Ana Macedo

1. His essays on climate change and the Anthropocene will be published in the books The Planet and the Human: The Anthropocene as Present (Chicago), and The Holocene Lost? Provincializing Europe in a Warming World (University Press of New England).