Coevalness and the Self-Immolating Woman: Anthropology's Objects

Abstract

Divergent but complementary approaches emerge out of the 80s to circumscribe anthropologists’ relation to object of study with respect to translation. Concerned with intersubjective treatment of anthropology’s object, Fabian critiques the denial of coevalness as the central problematic of interdisciplinary studies in the epistemic construction of knowledge. The author’s subversion overthrows the pinnacle of human progress embodied by the West. By deploying distancing devices to demonstrate how the Other had been coined in the Western imaginary - notably, as a temporal marker of the past - Fabian emphasizes that ethnocentric visualism is pre-existing in language. At the intersection with subjective knowing in anthropology, this article provides a theoretical framework for considering Johannes Fabian’s and Gayatri Spivak’s chronopolitics. Through an analysis of synchronicity, simultaneity and contemporaneity, it especially gives attention to three issues: visualism, language and distancing device. Applied to the Hindi or Sikh tradition of suttee, the question of time is regarded as a necessary object for analysis in order to bring the Other into an equivalent plane of reference. Mired is the day when one would exist beyond the exclusionary divider between Self and Other.