Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Ethnicity, Sociocultural Regeneration, and Planetary Realizations

Abstract

Ethnicity is an important part of our discourse and practice in our modern world and it affects our visions and practices of identity and differences. Our conventional notions of ethnicity are linked to our rootedness in a place and culture but it does not always acknowledge the significance of routes—interactions, influences, and intertwining pathways—in the very constitution and production of roots. This essay strives to rethink ethnicity and identities as cross-fertilization of roots and routes. Ethnic movements can go beyond the facile construction of insider and outsider and develop a new politics and spirituality of mutual blossoming and hospitality what is called sahadharma in this essay. Finally we can reconstitute ethnicity and identities in a connected way—connecting roots and routes—as belonging to our Mother Earth and not only to the territories or cultures we are born. This is the calling of planetary realizations explored in this essay which is different from monological and one-dimensional view of globalization still dominant in our fragile world.

This builds on my Keynote Address to the seminar on “Ethnicity and Globalization,” Lady Keane College, Shillong, December 4, December 4–5, 2013. I am grateful to Dr. Saji Verghese for his kind invitation and to Professor Sujata Miri and other participants for their comments and interest. This builds upon my introductory essay to a discussion symposium I co-nurtured with Dr. Marcus Bussey of University of Sunshine Coast for the journal Social Alternatives in 2017. An updated version is also coming out in Man in India and I thank its editor, Dr. Sumahan Banejree, for his kind interest and encouragement.