Time Treks : The Uncertain Future of Old and New Despotisms

Contents: Preface and acknowledgements. 1. The twentieth century : the Ambivalent homecoming of Homo psychologicus. 2. The fantastic India--Pakistan battle: or, the future of the past in South Asia. 3. Telling the story of communal conflicts in South Asia : Interim report on a personal search for defining myths. 4. Beyond the nuclear age: the future of 'futurelessness'. 5. The beautiful, expanding future of poverty: popular economics as a psychological defence. 6. Towards an alternative politics of psychology. 7. Humiliation: the politics and cultural psychology of the limits of human degradation. 8. The city of the mind: the darkness and the shadows. 9. Shamans, savages, and the wilderness: On the audibility of dissent and the future of civilizations. Index.

"In Time Warps: the Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts Ashish Nandy argued that his work can be seen as 'an adventure in one kind of time travel, where one mainly uses or invokes the past to shape the contemporary.'

In the present collection he reverses that journey. Using the metaphor of the future--imagined utopias, conceptions of cultural possibilities, social critiques of things to come--Nandy redefines the present. His effort is to demonstrate that, in a world increasingly dominated by a narrow range of ideologies, one must affirm that social ethics and a more humane society can be based on grounds other than those framed for the past 200 years by the west and thrust upon the rest.

Nandy critiques the enlightenment and all conceptions based on limited ideas of 'reason' and 'development' given shape in Europe, arguing 'our responsibility towards alternative systems of knowledge at points in time when human beings turn emancipatory ideas, ideologies, and categories into new tools of violence and oppression.'" (jacket)