Rose, Rahul (2025) The single-pointed mind: theorising attention from South Asia. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
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Abstract
This thesis takes as its primary site of engagement a pervasive concept: attention. As an implicit analytic, attention has long been used by anthropologists to explain various arenas of socio-cultural life pointing to its centrality in our formation as human subjects. Yet, anthropologists have also tended not to pay attention to attention itself – it has infrequently featured explicitly as a point of theoretical and ethnographic exploration. As part of an attempt to explicitly engage with this psycho-bodily capacity, I argue for a move away from the treatment of attention only as a self-evident aspect of experience, as is the case in much extant scholarship. Instead, I contend that a mature anthropology of attention should also focus on the ideological constitution of this psycho-bodily capacity – that is as a major site of emic theorisation and moral concern. This recognises more fully the importance of attention as a crucial ground of valorisation, contestation and anxiety through which diverse cultures and groups attempt to make up the self in particular ways. As proof of the value of this approach, the following account offers an attentionalist reading of north Indian culture and history. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Banaras as well as archival research, a number of well-worn areas of South Asian anthropology – colonial history, ritual, aesthetics and theories of self – are re-interpreted through an attentional lens. In each case, I explore how a particular ideology of attention – built around single-pointedness – is vital to how different social actors in Banaras attempt to shape their lives and their interiority. This reflects in part longstanding religious and ethical positions as well as the fact that since the colonial period, single-pointed attention, has provided a centralising value for an idealised conception of national subjectivity, offering a basis for an imaginary of Indian superiority grounded in introspective capacity.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) |
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Additional Information: | © 2025 Rahul Rose |
Library of Congress subject classification: | D History General and Old World > DS Asia G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology |
Sets: | Departments > Anthropology |
Supervisor: | Long, Nicholas J. and Bear, Laura |
URI: | http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4887 |
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