![]() Advisory Council Haji Mohamed Idris (Chairperson) Mohideen Kader Anwar Fazal Ashis Nandy Vinay Lal Shilpa Jain Claude Alvares (Convenor) |
Knowledge of the Future and the Future of Knowledge Vinay Lal Some ten years ago, when I was still a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I found to my considerable surprise that the influential journal Alternatives, which is jointly produced by the World Order Models Project in New York and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, had been shelved in the section reserved for journals in economics and operations research in the library of the university's business school. I could not have expected that Alternatives, which has featured much of the best work today on alternative conceptions of human needs, visions of human society, and modes of distributive justice, besides offering trenchant critiques of dominant models of war, violence, and political and economic repression, would be placed alongside journals in economics. Not everyone is necessarily agreed that economics remains, singularly, the dismal science; nonetheless, it is indisputably one of the most retrograde and parochial disciplines anywhere in the world, a discipline that, dare one say, will perforce have to be bludgeoned into humility before its perfidious pretensions to offering us reliable and worthy knowledge can be put to rest. In near proximity to Alternatives, on the other side of the shelf, lay various journals on forecasting, technological planning, and strategic management, as though the only conception of the future that we are permitted to have is one which the cormorant crew of economists, management specialists, and technocrats, who have hitherto failed miserably in giving us a more desirable society, have ordained as worthy of the attention of humankind. Economists have flourished, just as the societies they have been called to manage have decayed; but unlike the tribes to which they are likened, economists have scarcely had the decency to live in self-sufficiency. It is quite possible, of course, to describe the peculiar place that Alternatives occupies in the shelves of more than one university library as a technical problem in classification, or to attribute the error to the quirkiness of a few, perhaps ill-informed, librarians. All knowledge systems have relied on forms of classification, and the disposition towards one form of classification rather than another might be no less than the difference between competing visions of culture and society. Problems of classification and categorization, as is quite transparent, are almost never mere trivialities: thus the history of Sikhs in post-independent India might have been quite different had not the British classified them as a martial race, nor would the Gurkhas have continued to do the dirty work for British imperialists had they not fallen under the same rubric; similarly, if the deaths on account of development could be counted alongside the countless victims of numerous genocides, the twentieth-century might appear still more barbaric than it does even to the mere observer of history. It is through classification that otherness is marked, boundaries are marked, and entire cultures are construed as being civilized or rendered as outside the pale of civilization. The fate of those countries that the United States chooses to describe as outlaw or rogue states provides one of many instances of the power of naming and classification. There is in the tale of the not-mislaid journal, then, a rather more ominous warning, both about the oppressiveness of modern knowledge systems and the manner in which, as the Pakistani intellectual Ziauddin Sardar has described it, "the future has been colonised." At a considerable distance in the past, the future was the provenance of astrologers, soothsayers, palmists, and various other traditional specialists in magic, fortune-telling, and curses. In a manner of speaking, however, every story-teller was a futurist, since stories (though they are located in the past) are invariably interventions in the future. Story-telling is especially associated with children not merely because, as is commonly thought, children do not have a developed capacity for understanding abstractions, and consequently it is the concrete detail in which they are immersed. Everyone recognizes that stories are vehicles for the transmission of moral lessons, but it is preeminently through stories that we convey to children our ideas of, and hopes for, the future: the future has no meaning without children, and it is in them that we invest our futures. The ancient Greeks certainly recognized that no matter where one went, one was bound to encounter a story. It is no accident that the greatest of the Greek writers in the post-Homeric period was the boisterous and mythomaniac story-teller, Herodotus; indeed, to take a heretical view, the demise of Greek civilization can be marked by the advent of the historian Thucydides, who set out to correct the record, tame Herodotus's flights of imagination, and present a more realistic account of Greek society. While the most outlandish and egregious of Herodotus's representations of the Other were absorbed over time into the West's huge corpus of ideas about purportedly barbaric, primitive, or otherwise inferior and exotic civilizations, in every other respect Herodotus was sought to be disciplined. Herodotuss depictions of northern Africa as inhabited by headless or dog-headed people, with eyes in their breasts, or of black men as producers of black sperm, were considered as quite authentic representations of the Other (Mudimbe 1994), but in other respects Thucydidess ruthless devotion to realpolitik and his rejection of sentimentality were seen as more reliable signposts to the future and the exercise of power. Western civilization has ever since gradually been losing its capacity for story-telling, possessed as it is by the desire to scientize its narratives. If at the lower end the astrologers and palmists reigned supreme, at the higher end the lot of thinking about the future fell to the utopian visionary and the prophet. Many utopian thinkers were, however, inclined to locate their utopia not in the future but in the past, in some imagined 'Golden Age' when law and order prevailed, and when justice was not so easily mocked. Though the tradition of Utopian thinking survives in the twentieth century, judging from the works of H. G. Wells, Eugene Zamiatin, Aldoux Huxley, George Orwell, and many other lesser writers, it has been showing a precipitous decline for some time, and has now largely been relegated to the ranks of science fiction writers and their admirers who are determined to establish that the American government has been conspiring to keep knowledge of Martians and other extra-terrestrials a secret. In the United States, a country uniquely built on the promise of the future, nothing is as prized as the past, and most achievements are at once earmarked as historic: no utopian thinking can truly be contemplated among a people whose millenarianism is only an impoverished fundamentalism. Prophecy has been even more effectively pushed into complete extinction, asphyxiated on the one hand by the increasing dominance of the historical mode, and condemned on the other hand as a regrettable residue of medieval superstition, the remaining sibling of alchemy and black magic. In the English-speaking part at least of the Western world, Blake appears to be the last in the line of the prophets, but the entire West remains alienated from the prophetic mode, and not only because of the loss of orality, the transformation of the countryside, the overwhelming ascendancy of the print (and now visual) media, the declining emphasis on memory, the submission of civilizational entities to the nation-state, and the disappearance of the classic itinerant. Though Marx and Freud might well be hailed as prophets in their own right, they remain resolutely the creatures of knowledge formations which envision no possibility for dissent other than in the language of those formations themselves. Thus Marxism can allow for no critique that is not historical, and indeed to be non-historical, or even a-historical, is to open oneself to the charge of belonging with the primitive, with those hordes still vegetating in the frozen vestibule of time. It must come as a surprise to many, then, to find that the future is striking again. In the public domain, most particularly in the United States, the future is most often recalled in the conventional pieties of politicians's pronouncements, in their exhortation to us to remember what is good for "our children's children". It is to assure "our children", and in turn "their children", a bright future, free of biological weapons and poisonous gases, that Clinton proposed to initiate the next round of the carpet-bombing of Iraq: if the preservation of the honor of Englishwoman was seen as conferring upon their menfolk the right to commit mayhem around the world, the invocation of "our childrens future" now similarly provides a sanctimonious license to discipline a recalcitrant world. More generally, however, the American tendency is to turn the future over to policy planners, management specialists, technocrats, and -- most of all -- computer whiz kids. In this vision, if so lofty a word may be used to describe the pedestrian rumblings of glorified plumbers, the world wide web and the internet will keep us all connected, and chat rooms and cyber cafes, we are induced to believe, will suitably substitute for table-talk and what once everyone understood as conversation. We may all be connected, but apropos Thoreau's comment upon learning of the invention of the telegraph, do we all have something to say to each other? While diagnosing the failures of the Englishman in the colonies, E. M. Forster -- who divined as well the madness that men are capable of to preserve the sanctity of women and children -- came upon the sacred mantra to bring together the East and the West: "Only connect." But our modern form of connectedness is only a travesty of the feeling of community that now seems irretrievably lost, and a lesser degree of connectedness would do a great deal to render the world more pluralistic, more impermeable to the dominant categories of knowledge and homogenising contours of culture. Had we been more attentive to the political economy of hybridity, we might sooner have come to the recognition that multiculturalism has flowered in the most insipid, not to mention insidious, ways -- in the elimination of multiplicity, and in the promotion of monoculturalism. We are connected, most surely, but only by the barest threads and lifelines that the dominant culture of the West deigns to place in other palms. The imperialists of a previous generation are the multiculturalists of our times. No doubt, if the future was left to technoplanners and compuexperts (such being the neologisms of this generation), we would achieve the same results envisioned by the creators of the neutron bomb, which while destroying all signs of life leaves buildings intact. Since the human being is the one unpredictable animal, many planners for the future find homo sapiens to be a rather unpleasant reminder of the impossibility of a perfect blueprint. Yet, since the essence of the Western ethos is to strive (and not always, or even seldom, for the good), and merely to strive, mastery over the future -- following the now-contested mastery over nature, women, and children -- is deemed an imperative. Consequently, like everything else, the future too has become a subject of study. Though the study of the future has only a fraction of the trappings associated with the traditional disciplines, future trends are there to be seen. The futurists have their own associations and organizations, their annual conventions, and their own organs of research and communication. Across the globe, especially in the 'advanced' Western nations, where the future will increasingly begin to look like their past, even a few university departments of future studies have cropped up. Though in some sectors the futurist has yet to gain academic respectability, since his or her calling is still associated with astrology, numerology, palmistry, and other supposed superstitions, the study of the future is nonetheless now poised to become a big business. As the rest of the world embraces the market morality, and countries consent to the structural readjustment mandates of the IMF, the same breed that rules the roost in Western countries is beginning to flex its muscles in developing countries. In a country like India, where business schools were something of an anomaly less than two decades ago, and where business had less than the tinge of respectability, no degree is now more coveted than the MBA. Suited and booted financial planners, consultants, management experts, and computer specialists, who have learned the tools of their trade from the West (thereby enacting the modern form of Vishwakarma puja, or a Hindu religious rite in which the worship of tools, which signify the Lords creation, is undertaken), partake of the "hotel lobby culture" described by Cornel West, and it is at their business seminars and lunches that they hatch those schemes designed to render the future of India (and much of the Third World) like the present of the West. Truly, the future of the greater part of the non-West, if the forecasters, planners, and technoexperts are to be believed, is to be without any intimations of the future: it is to live someone else's life, to dream someone else's dream, to inhabit someone else's skin, and to become someone else's merchandise. In the matter of the future, one might then reasonably infer, it will be business as usual. For a very brief moment, it appeared as though this business would be fatally interrupted by the demise of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Some disciplines, such as anthropology, Oriental studies, and historical studies, which served as the handmaiden to the West in its efforts to colonize the world, had as it seemed long ago outlived their usefulness; other disciplines, such as political science, which had flourished during the Cold War, and had, in a substantial number of its practitioners, no other reason for being than to be the foot-soldiers of America's consumerist ambitions, political self-aggrandizement, and ideological war on communism, should have faced extinction. But no species has ever willed its own destruction, however close human beings have been to eliminating themselves (and other species, who are not granted the dignity of survival in-themselves, but only for humans); moreover, Western man knows little else if he does not know the art of re-tooling. All the questionable disciplines adroitly reinvented themselves and even became indispensable. It had been conventional to believe that only the West had history, but after the atrocities of the two world wars, and more particularly the genocidal impulses of the Germans, not to mention the American resort to nuclear terrorism in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Allied blitzkrieg in Dresden and elsewhere in Germany, much of this history seemed a bit unsavory. If, after Hitler and Mussolini, the great man of history theory no longer appeared so compelling and unambivalent, innumerable heroes could be recovered from the battlefields. Historical studies did not have to seek far and wide to find other hospitable homes: history was to become responsive by becoming the common man's chosen field, the everyman's hobby. Anthropology was supposedly to develop a critical bent, and become sensitive, self-reflexive, and more pluralistic; this 'internal critique' continues, and has helped to shape, though not decisively yet, the future of anthropology departments, where the physical anthropologists and old cultural anthropologists have not quite exhausted their depredations. Oriental studies, meanwhile, had become reconceptualized as area studies, a matter even of vital national security, and to this have been added various forms of ethnic and minority studies. This form of self-fashioning, of acquiring an acquaintance with the Other, sampling various cuisines, and acquiring a library of world music, is now even championed as multiculturalism, as an instance of the West's unique thirst for knowledge and capacity for curiosity. It has almost nothing to do with the opening or closing of the so-called American mind. What, then, of the political scientists, those members of the American academy who so shamelessly thrived on the foreign policy and defense establishments, or of the economists, who were so warmly embraced by the authoritarian regimes of Latin America or Asia? The latter, who have more lives than do cats, have found their calling once again, as the former Soviet bloc opens itself up to the rapacious drives of the West, and the booming tiger economies of Asia show unmistakable and alarming signs of weariness, poor management, and what Western economists describe as an inadequate comprehension of the working of the invisible hand. Nickel-and-dime capitalists once again can provide hoary testimony to the endurance of the American dream: the rags-to-riches narrative survives, though perhaps it is finding a more hospitable reception elsewhere: witness the ascendancy to the Presidency of India of a man from the class of dalits, once commonly described as 'untouchables', or the recent Prime Ministership of a man from a peasant community. Indeed, never has the economist had such a large playing field as he does now, when the entire developing world seems on the brink of 'liberalisation' and 'privatisation': the academic economist is easily transformed into a corporate economist. This apparent shrinking of the world, which we are told will make of the world a 'global village', is music to the ears of the capitalist and the economist alike. 'Globalisation' in effect means that the colonisation of the developing world, which in time was not even financially lucrative for European powers in some cases, can now be rendered complete. Moreover, when the exercise of power was once naked, and the victories of the battlefield were won by the ruthless bombing of villages, ironically termed pacification, and the Maxim gun, now domination will take place under the sweeter and gently-killing dispensation of McDonalds and Coca-Cola. Cows must be fattened before they can slaughtered. But the story of globalisation scarcely ends here. Though the shape of the future under globalisation suggests unequivocally the narrowing of cultural options, the reduction of democracy to largely meaningless gestures at the electoral booth, the beggaring of the Third World, and the instillation of the warped mentality of the West into people not so utterly incapable of dealing with the Other except by habitual recourse to various forms of total violence, what is most at stake is the future of knowledge itself, though the debate is most often cast in terms of 'culture'. The "battle lines of the future", the political scientist Samuel Huntington was to argue a few years ago, will be the "fault lines between civilization", and he sees the future as one in which the center stage will be occupied by a conflict between Western civilization on the one hand, and Chinese nationalists and Muslim fanatics, acting singly or in concert, on the other hand. (It is axiomatic that Western and civilization are supposed to be in natural apposition to each other, just as Muslim and fanatics are presumed as making happy bed-fellows. Perhaps we ought to place Western and fanatics in apposition to each other, and the two together in opposition to Muslim civilization.) That this thesis should have been advanced by "mad-dog Huntington", as he was known to radicals in the sixties, is scarcely surprising. First an avid proponent of America's involvement in the Vietnam war, and then an advocate of the nuking of Vietnam, Huntington became one of the foremost ideologues of the Cold War and was subsequently to find himself much in demand as a mercenary, offering such advise to despotic regimes as would enable them to be properly authoritarian, all to equip themselves for a future of democracy. Since the end of the Cold War threatened to run him out of business, leaving him with a mere Harvard sinecure, Huntington had to reinvent himself, and rather adeptly -- as the millennium draws to a close -- he chose a Spenglerian world-view to paint the picture of the future. Huntington's thesis is all too simple: where previously world conflicts were largely political or economic, the new conflicts will be largely cultural. Having identified seven or eight civilizations -- "Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and 'possibly' African, one suspects in approximate descending order of importance and worthiness -- Huntington advances the view that these civilizations are bound to be in conflict with each other. "Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, [and] the separation of church and state, often have little resonance" in other cultures. These differences, "the product of centuries", will endure; they are more lasting than "differences among political ideologies and political regimes." Many developed countries modernized, introducing such technology and administrative efficiency as would enable them to raise the standards of living for their people and compete in the world market; but these countries did not Westernize, as it was scarcely to be expected that they would compromise, for example, their collectivist spirit (as in the case of China and Japan) for the individualism that is ingrained in the Western psyche. Huntington takes it as axiomatic that these alleged differences will lead to conflict, which he sees as exacerbated by the increasing tendency towards "economic regionalism". Many of these civilizations, in other words, are developing, or have developed, their own trading blocs; and the increasing world-wide trade is not so much between different trading blocs, as it is within these blocs. Thus, howsoever inadvertently, Huntington returns to the thesis that world conflict will be bound up with economic competition, as though numerous forecasters have not been laboring to make this transparent for a very long time. (One discerns even, in some of these prognoses, the desire that trade wars should lead to something more manly and rougher. War has been good to the West: if Germany was the classic case of a nation built on a war machine in the first half of this century, it is the armaments industry and the 'military-industrial complex' that powered the United States to the status of the world's preeminent power in our times.) The attempts of the West to impose its values upon other cultures are countered by other civilizations, Huntington argues, and as non-Western civilizations are no longer mere objects but "movers and shapers of history", violent resistance is to be expected. The clash of civilizations "will dominate global politics" and determine the shape of the future. Though Huntington already finds such clashes between civilizations taking place around the world, the brunt of his thesis is that the West should expect conflict between itself and the two entities, China and the Muslim world, which most have the power to resist the West's continuing influence. Islam is most hostile to everything from which the West draws its sustenance, and drawing upon an earlier and lesser-known piece by his fellow Ivy-League cohort, the Orientalist Bernard Lewis, Huntington is inclined to believe that Muslims can tolerate neither the separation of church and state, nor submission to infidels. It is not that imperialism and domination are unacceptable in themselves to Muslims: rather, as Lewis was to put it, "What is truly evil and unacceptable [to Muslims] is the domination of infidels over true believers." In Huntington's cryptic formulation, "Islam has bloody borders." While the "roots of Muslim rage" are an ambition that is thwarted and the paramountcy of Christianity over Islam, it is, on the other hand, the insularity, arrogance, and self-centredness of China, which is now poised to rule over the Pacific, and where since time immemorial totalitarian regimes have crushed the rights of the people, that makes it an implacable foe of Western democracies. While Huntington and others of his ilk have never been known for the rigor of their thought, and it would be fanciful to expect them to be conversant with the theoretical movements that have over the last two decades greatly aided in analyzing political and cultural discourse, it is evident that Huntington is unable to make the most elementary distinctions between the nation-state and civilization, or understand the consequences of injecting essences into politics. So the dispute over Kashmir becomes part of the fabric of "the historic clash between Muslim and Hindu in the subcontinent", and since "Hindu" and "Islam" point to two kinds of civilizations, a conflict between nations-state, themselves the product of forms of reification of identity under the oppressive political paramountcy of a colonial power, becomes a conflict between civilizations. Just how "historic" is the "historic clash" between Islam and Hinduism on the Indian sub-continent, and does this history take us back to 1947, to the early part of the nineteenth century and the inauguration of what the historian Gyan Pandey has described as the 'communal riot narrative', or to the beginnings of Islam (as Huntington would no doubt like to believe) in India in the eighth century? Huntington recognizes no "Indian" civilization, which has been infinitely more pluralistic than anything European Christendom has ever known, just as he transposes the experience of Europe's bloody religious past on to every other place, assuming of course that there could have been no superior form of social organization, and more elastic conception of self, outside Europe. Huntington's view here is the primitive one that religion must remain the fault line between civilizations, because howsoever insistent the West may be on retaining the separation between church and state, other civilizations have their essential and inescapable grounding in religion. Though the West orients itself spatially, the Orient renounces spatiality: thus we have Confucian but not Chinese civilization, Hindu but not Indian civilization, and Slavic-Orthodox but not Eurasian civilization. Huntington's essences are the stuff from which the proponents of the national-character industry made their living and killing some decades ago. If Huntington fatally substitutes 'Hindu' for 'Indian', no less egregious is it to suppose that the West is the repository of such ideas as 'human rights' and 'the rule of law'. This leads us, of course, to such nauseating spectacles as the report of Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, lecturing the Vietnamese last year about their inadequate respect for human rights, which the United States did everything to decimate in Vietnam and has done little to respect around the rest of the world. After having engineered the first genocides of the modern period, and being responsible for the most gruesome ones of our own bloody century, the West can applaud itself for having successfully induced some other peoples to act in its mirror image. Since the hypocrisy of the West in these matters is now too well-known and documented to require any further comment, a more disturbing and less-noticed strategy to colonise the future of much of the world deserves scrutiny. As the record of the West, after the overwhelming evidence proffered by the genocidal annihilation of native populations in the Americas and Australia, the history of colonialism around the world, and the Holocaust within Europe itself, in perpetuating unspeakable atrocities can no longer be denied or camouflaged, a species of American or Western "exceptionalism" is introduced to differentiate the actions of the West from the rest of the world. "The accusations" against the West "are familiar", concedes Bernard Lewis, and to them, he continues, "we have no option but to plead guilty -- not as Americans, nor yet as Westerners, but simply as human beings, as members of the human race." Since this is too prosaic for words, Lewis moves to a higher level of comparison: so the treatment of women, deplorable as it has been in the West, "unequal and often oppressive", is nonetheless said "at its worst" to be "rather better than the rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the almost universal lot of womankind on this planet." But as even this is not wholly convincing, and certainly subject to dispute, Lewis moves on to what he imagines is the loftier form of the argument. What is "peculiar" about the "peculiar institution" of slavery is that in the United States it was eventually abolished -- and so from here impeccably to the non sequitur that Westerners "were the first to break the consensus of acceptance and to outlaw slavery, first at home, then in the other territories they controlled, and finally wherever in the world they were able to exercise power or influence -- in a word, by means of imperialism." Having first introduced slavery to many parts of the world where it was never practiced, Western powers conspired, against their own self-interest, to outlaw it: Lewis finds that a charming thought. So the West is "distinct from all other civilizations in having recognized, named, and tried, not entirely without success, to remedy those historic diseases" such as racism, sexism, and slavery: herein is the exceptionalism of the West. While the general tenor of American or Western exceptionalism similarly defines Huntington's enterprise, he follows the complementary strategy of demonstrating the ills that must result when the rest of the world emulates the West. It is not that the West must not, in principle, be emulated: we should all aspire to the greater good. Moreover, since the natives thrive on mimicry, a good course must be left for the non-West to follow. If there is to be a universalism, it can only be universalism on the Western model; but what sort of universalism is it which makes the world capable of equating America not with democracy, the Bill of Rights, the spirit of freedom, and the inalienable right to the pursuits of happiness and liberty, but with Pepsi, Madonna, and McDonalds, in short with "US pop culture and consumer goods." The essence of western culture", Huntington is at pains to persuade, "is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac", the English of Shakespeare and not of pure instrumentality, and the conflation between the two cheapens the inestimable achievements of the West. Nor is this all: if the West can even turn its evils into good, as Bernard Lewis pleads apropos imperialism, Huntington inclines to the formulation that the rest of the world habitually renders all that is good into evil. Most notably, Huntington sees this in the trend to accept modernization but not Westernization; and if this appears to be merely innocuous, or at most mildly self-serving, consider that "when non-western societies adopt western-style elections, democracy often brings to power anti-western political movements." The warped minds of tin-pot Asian and African despots render democracy instrumental to totalitarian impulses and designs: "Democracy tends to make a society more parochial, not more cosmopolitan." It must perforce, on Huntington's view, be Western exceptionalism, rather than Western universalism, that will mark the future. It is an extraordinarily telling comment on the state of knowledge and the academy that so poorly conceived, not to mention absurdly reductionist, arguments should have received the accolades that Huntington's papers have garnered. If the future is to be defined between the polarities of Western exceptionalism and Western universalism, then the only future that remains is to opt out of this debilitating and diseased view of the future. This is less than easily attained, since the West has even attempted to foreclose all dissenting futures. No dissent that does not take place in a form understandable to the West, or according to its canons of civility, is constituted as dissent; and every act of dissent that calls into question the purportedly dissenting frameworks of knowledge thrown up by the West in recent years, whether encapsulated under the terms 'post-colonial' or 'post-modern', is construed as a retreat into romanticism, indigenism, nativism, or tribalism. As our very idea of the future has been held subject to the dominant ideas purveyed by the experts, it becomes inescapably clear that no better future can be expected unless we can decolonize the dominant framework of knowledge (Lal 1997). The twentieth-century university, with its disciplinary formations and its well-intentioned multicultural brigades, will have to number among the first of the victims. The earliest measure of our new-found wisdom and knowledge might well be to recognize that when the experts are removed from their area of expertise, the future will begin to manifest itself as more ecological, multifarious, and just. References: Huntington, Samuel. 1993. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer):22-49. Huntington, Samuel. 1997. "The west and the rest." Prospect (February):34-39. Lal, Vinay. 1997. "Discipline and Authority: Some Notes on Future Histories and Epistemologies of India", Futures 29, no. 10 (December):985-1000. Lewis, Bernard. 1990. "The Roots of Muslim Rage." Atlantic Monthly (September):47-54. Mudimbe, V. Y. The Idea of Africa. 1994. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey. Nandy, Ashis. 1996. "Bearing Witness to the Future." Futures 28, nos. 6-7 (August-September):636-9.
[First published in a shorter version as "The Future of Knowledge" , Seminar, no. 460 (December 1997), pp. 25-30; this version published as "Futures and Knowledge" in Ziauddin Sardar, ed., Rescuing All Our Futures: The Future of Future Studies, Adamantine Studies on the 21st Century, no. 32 (Twickenham, England: Adamantine Press, 1998; Westport, CT.: Praeger Publishers, 1998), pp. 210-220.]
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