Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from C ...

First, Bourdieu’s poststructuralist project does not propose an ontology of the social but is primarily descriptive. Second, Bourdieu’s reservoir of theoretical concepts constitutes a “metatheory,” which allows it to be used with other theoretical frameworks, such as the insights of the Subaltern Studies school of South Asian historiography, the Gramscian notion of “legitimation crisis,” or the concept of the “network society.”⁵⁸ In this regard, Brubaker notes the “extreme generality” of Bourdieu’s theoretical conceptions, while Sulkunnen speaks of Bourdieu’s flexible and “plastic” sociology.⁵⁹ Bourdieu’s example in his book Distinction of undertaking quantitative sociological analysis through the exploratory statistical technique of correspondence analysis also presents a viable method for mapping the distribution of themes in Indian nationalisms online.⁶⁰

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical and methodological framework employed in the study. Critical issues that warrant theoretical reorientation of the concepts in reading Indian history are also examined here. These are (a) the problematic of instrumentality in Bourdieu’s theory, (b) the problematic of Eurocentricity, and (c) the problematic of the religious field as theorized by Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s theory has been critiqued on the grounds that it is excessively deterministic and totalizing—for example, offering no space for political resistance—which also exposes him to the criticism that he does not satisfactorily explain how his analysis is exempt from the logic of reproducing dominant power structures.⁶¹ This charge may be answered in part by pointing to the descriptive and metatheoretical nature of Bourdieu’s framework, which does not necessarily preclude the possibility of agency or political action but seeks to demonstrate how such possibilities themselves are intertwined with more fundamental logics of social practice. Additionally, Bourdieu draws attention to the fact that the analytical categories that he employs, such as “classes,” are theoretical constructs. Social space, as Bourdieu describes it, is composed of a network of possible contestations and alliances between groups across different fields and not of entities that correspond to empirical fixities. Combined with Bourdieu’s emphasis on reflexive sociology, this approach illuminates, at once, the critical explicatory value of the framework and its limits.