The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Pred, 1985; Harris, 1991). For, as Hannah

(2006a, p. 243) put it, ‘neither term of the

structure-agency duality is of much analytical

use in the unmarked, abstract, universal form’:

The important thing about subjects striving

to make lives and worlds is not the abstract

philosophical principle according to which

we are all competent actors always able to

do otherwise, but the concrete, positioned

and marked performances through which

we (re)produce or transform specific social

meanings. And the important thing about

the structures that prevent differently positi-

oned subjects from doing or being just any-

thing we want is not their general presence

and effectivity in everysocial formation

but their specific characteristics as contested

and contestable social constructions, often

originating with dominant social groups.

The central term that most human geog-

raphers derived from Giddens’ project was

that ofpractice, at once situated and embodied,

and this continues to inform much research in

the field. But the concept has been extended

through ideas ofperformanceand the incorp-

oration ofaffectto such a degree that most

human geographers have travelled a consid-

erable distance from the formal corpus of

structuration theory (see, for example,non-

representational theory). In fact, it was

always more of a ‘sensitizing device’ than a

research programme, providing a high-level

view of different positions within modern

social theory – a sort of panoramic mapping –

rather than a hierarchy of concepts that could

inform ground-level studies. Giddens’ work is

now valued less for its abstract formulations

than for its substantive identification of two

issues that continue to haunt the world in the

early twenty-first century. His early insistence

on the significance of politicalviolencefor

the conduct of political and social life was

remarkably prescient (Giddens, 1985: see also

war), while discussions ofglobalizationand

the prospects for social democracy continue to

be informed, at least in part, by his argumen-

tation sketches of the contours of what he

called ‘high’modernity(Giddens, 1990).dg

Suggested reading

Gregory (1994); Gregson (2005).

subaltern studies A body of historiography

initiated in the late 1970s by Indian and English

historians critical of ‘colonialist and bourgeois-

nationalist e ́litism’ in the writing of Indian

history, specifically from the Cambridge

School (Guha and Spivak, 1988). Under

Ranajit Guha’s founding editorship, the editor-

ial collective included Shahid Amin, David

Arnold, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman

and Gyanendra Pandey, later expanding with

Gautam Bhadra, Dipesh Chakrabarty and

Sumit Sarkar, all of whom had written import-

ant monographs. The first edited volume,

Subaltern studies: writings on Indian history and

society, was published in 1982. The collective

drew on British social history and its renovation

of Antonio Gramsci, from whom the concept

‘subaltern’ was adapted.

The timing of this critique of Indian

nationalism(particularly Marxist national-

ism) – after the suppression of the Naxalbari

peasant insurgency and its ‘Maoist’ urban

allies, and after Indira Gandhi’s 1975–7 dicta-

torial emergency – is crucial. The first volumes

the collective produced exploredpeasants’

conscious agency and autonomous subaltern

politics (which Cambridge historians had

ignored in their emphasis on vertical ‘factions’

in Indian nationalism), a comment on the

bankruptcy of institutionalized Indianmarx-

ism. From rumour and militancy under the

paternalist mantle of Gandhianism to mis-

matches between elite and subaltern notions

of political community to the disruptive effects

of mill workers’ religiosity on industrial discip-

line, the first four volumes ofSubaltern Studies

energized debate within Indian history on

class, subaltern/elite boundaries and popular

politics (Ludden, 2002).

By the late 1980s, shifts between insiders

and outsiders in the collective moved subal-

tern studies into a second phase of historiog-

raphy, concerned less with a sphere of

subaltern politics than with the construction

of subalternpower/knowledge and critique of

‘theenlightenmentProject’. While one for-

mer insider, Sumit Sarkar, bemoaned ‘the

decline of the subaltern inSubaltern Studies’,

others saw it as serious response to outsider

critiques of ‘subaltern autonomy’, as well as an

exploration beyond Gramsci to Michel

Foucault’s conception of thesubjectof power,

and to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction

(see Chaturvedi, 2000).

These intellectual shifts, combined with the

edited collection by Guha and Spivak (1988),

brought subaltern studies to a US – and hence

global – academic audience; Edward Said’s

introduction to the collection ushered its

arrival as the most prolific strand of post-

colonial thought. Volumes to follow heigh-

tened critique from insiders and outsiders on

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SUBALTERN STUDIES