Modernity & Agency: How Activisits reconstructed Nepali Society – Talk by David Gellner

Latour’s ideas and terminology have been widely influential within social and cultural anthropology, even amongst those who are not inclined to follow Actor-Network-Theory. Latourian vocabulary for describing the modernity we have never had is acceptable and often suggestive, but Latour’s attack on individual and collective human agency is particularly ill suited to explaining the rise of new kinds of identity. I describe the rise of new ‘ethnic’ and ‘macro category’ identities in Nepal and suggest that the analysis applies to many other social identities as well. I argue that activists are masters and mediators of Latourian ‘hybridity’.