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Concepts from the Global South
Theoretical and Methodological Reflections
in Contributions to the History of Concepts
Author:
Margrit Pernau
Margrit Pernau
Senior Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany pernau@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
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Abstract
Taking its starting point from Dipesh Chakravarty's Provincializing Europe and in particular European analytical concepts, this article argues that it is time to move beyond the diagnosis of “inadequate, but indispensable.” I discuss three approaches that have been suggested for the development of analytical concepts for global history: the creation of equivalents across languages by the historical subjects; the identification of problems as a starting point to trace the language that has been developed to discuss them; and comparison. I then propose a strategy, based on Rolf Reichardt's semantic nets, but taking it beyond its reliance on words, and words in one language only. I argue that these revised semantic nets have the potential to allow us to both trace connections between languages and generate concepts for our analyses, if and when needed, which are not necessarily universal in claim, but transcend source concepts in individual languages.
Contributor Notes
Margrit Pernau is Senior Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. E-mail: pernau@mpib-berlin.mpg.de