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Landscapes of Hierarchy

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Abstract

Dilip Menon is a historian of ideas. For the past decade, he has been working with transnational oceanic histories, and the idea of knowledge from the global south. He is currently the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies and the Director of the Center for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He continues to write and think about issues of inequality, particularly that of caste and hierarchy in India. In this essay, he explores landscapes of inequality over the world—political, economic, and epistemological—through conjunctures in his life and his evolving engagement with an intellectual history of the limits of decolonization in the global south.

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Notes

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    Joel Robbins, “Equality as a Value: Ideology in Dumont, Melanesia and the West,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 36 (1994): 21–70.

  2. 2.

    Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: Chicago University Press. 1980); Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).

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    Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Delhi: Penguin, 2021).

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    Mark W. Driscoll, The Whites are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).

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    T. Mkandawire, “The Spread of Economic Doctrine and Policymaking in Postcolonial Africa,” African Studies Review, 57, 1 (2014): 171–198.

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    Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020), p. 670.

  7. 7.

    Dilip M. Menon, “Introduction,” in Dilip M. Menon (edt), Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South (London: Routledge, 2022).

  8. 8.

    Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines: A Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

  9. 9.

    “Patrice Lumumba: The most Important Assassination of the twentieth century,” The Guardian, 20 January 2011 (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination (accessed 20 December 2021).

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Menon, D. (2023). Landscapes of Hierarchy. In: Christiansen, C.O., Machado-Guichon, M.L., Mercader, S., Hunt, O.B., Jha, P. (eds) Talking About Global Inequality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08042-5_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08042-5_12

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