The Modern South Asia Series showcases the recent burst of intellectual energy worldwide regarding Social Science research on South Asia. Recent developments are generating exciting and new research puzzles, while also compelling return to some enduring concerns. The themes attracting interest are: democracy, identity politics, group conflict, social justice, governance, economic growth, inequalities, education and health, regional disparities, environment, gender, national security, the rise of cities, changes in culture and social structure, and the significance of diasporas. The new Oxford University Press Series on Modern South Asia seeks to cover these issues, and will also publish any other book projects that generate editorial interest.

Thinking from Elsewhere invites manuscripts animated by three touchstones at the heart of the anthropological endeavor: first, a conceptual labor that struggles with and occasionally displaces habitual categories of thought. Second, an ethnographic labor animated by a desire to be attentive to life in its singularities, and third, a sustained engagement with other forms of knowledge, without a stable agreement on where knowledge might be found.

Thinking from Elsewhere seeks to expand the horizon of thinking by departing from the increasing compartmentalization of anthropological knowledge into familiar subfields and regional traditions. An “elsewhere” signals an alterity within that may depart from and fragment categories such as west and non-west. An elsewhere may be found within dominant forms of knowledge and in the experimentation with forms of life. Thinking is entangled with elsewheres, which can appear in the form of concepts but also in movements of the heart, the soul, and the body; in forms of relationality; in ancient texts brought back to life, in clinical encounters and afflictions, in works of literature and film, and in other ways in which the earth expresses itself, and worlds are corroded and made habitable.

Thinking from Elsewhere welcomes boundary-pushing and daring manuscripts that expand our picture of thinking through scrupulous attention to and engagement with a milieu. This engagement can take the route of ethnography or archival work, but it can also take the form of an anthropological engagement with film, contemporary art, literature, and philosophy. We are interested in the kinds of elsewhere(s) that a new generation of anthropological knowledge might fathom. We are particularly open to manuscripts emerging from centers of anthropology outside of the US, UK, and France. 

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