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Two prominent archaeologists utilizing history in their archaeology offer thoughts on the essays and on the historical turn in Southeastern archaeology considering especially the themes of historical process, historical consciousness, and historical ontology

This chapter describes Gilles Deleuze's early work on David Hume. Deleuze and Félix Guattari's call for a theme of problematising history is also elaborated. It discusses the problems of the Scottish Enlightenment that are inseparable from the current situation, problems that may allow for the creative transformation of the unquestioned actualities of daily life. Hume's discussion of identity occurs at a crucial point in the Treatise. Hume attempted to carry his thought beyond everyday actualities. It then explores how a Deleuzian historical ontology could be employed to understand intellectual and cultural change. Deleuzian problematising history begins with concepts as solutions in order to move towards the virtual fields and problems that are inseparable from the functional concepts and representations; and it is this virtual field that makes new work possible — that is, the mapping and representational work of functional concepts.

This chapter concentrates on the history of, and more precisely on a discussion of, the relationship between creative, novel events and the already constituted historical conditions within which these events appear. Central to Gilles Deleuze's account of problematizing history is the concept of ‘counter-actualization’. Deleuze makes clear that counter-actualization operates as a quasicause. Michel Foucault is also considered in order to clarify problematizing history further. The chapter turns to Deleuze's final published essay, ‘Immanence: a life . . .,’ in order to detail further the relationship between creative events and the actual, historical situations within which these events occur. The guiding example for this discussion is the life and work of Kafka, for Kafka would indeed be for Deleuze one of the very few who could call himself a writer. It is critical to understand the importance of the indefinite in Deleuze's discussion.

The opening chapter explores a philosophic question that reflexively sheds light on the orientation of the book as a whole: how can we write the history of the present? Against the backdrop of the more specific question of how to understand the present state of philosophy, it turns to the late work of Michel Foucault and his unique account of the ontology of actuality or of contemporary reality (ontologie de l’actualité). It carefully reconstitutes his concern with providing a historico-philosophical justification of his own project, which he situates in a trajectory that begins with the emergence of the ontology of actuality in the later Kant. It assesses the contemporary relevancy of his critique of historical periodization and his redefinition of modernity in terms of a critical attitude. Given the apparent contradiction between his rejection of periodic history and his identification of a new era of historical thought, the chapter goes on to suggest that an alternative logic of history—founded on the three dimensions of time, space and social practice—would allow us to completely reformulate the way in which we think the present.

This introductory chapter defines the intellectual agenda of locating the medical, and explains its significance. It situates the volume as a platform for the traffic of ideas and approaches between the history of medicine as a sub-discipline and South Asian history, more generally. It sets out recent historiographical trajectories, examines the theoretical purchase of historical ontologies (as the methodological inspiration) for this project, and provides a brief outline of chapters in this collection.

This chapter lays out the historical methodology of the book. The primary inquiry of this book is ontological, but not foundational. It is historical. In other words, it does not aim to identify the absolute and immutable structure of being forever and all time (being qua being). The contribution of Being and Motion is to locate a new historical ontology of motion—a minimal condition that, from the perspective of the present, appears to have always been a hidden dimension of the past. The aim is therefore to take one the most important (not the only or essential) features of contemporary reality (motion) and use it to reinterpret the dominant notions of ontology, such as space, time, force, quality, quantity, relation, and so on. From the vantage point of the present, the past can now be reinterpreted anew, without foreclosing the future.

This chapter critically examines the history of selfhood in Western society. A brief and selective history of the self from the classical Greek philosophers to the end of the twentieth century is presented with an emphasis on traditional psychological conceptions of the self. The views of Locke and Rousseau on the natural and social self and their influences on contemporary psychological theorizing about the self are discussed. The historical development of forms of psychological selfhood is traced (e.g. Freud, James), and those conceptions that have been of particular interest to educational psychologists are explored in depth. Work in the history of psychology and selfhood by Baumeister, Taylor, Danziger, Guignon, and others is discussed. The chapter concludes with a brief account of Ian Hacking’s ideas concerning the ways in which psychology has contributed to the making up of new ways of being persons, what Hacking refers to as historical ontology.

Being and Motion puts forth a new conceptual and ontological framework of analysis that begins with the primacy of motion. Indeed, the early twenty-first century has already shown itself to be an age defined increasingly by motion—by migration and global mobility, by kinetic theories of quantum fields, and by the mobility of the digital image. This short conclusion highlights the main theses put forward by this book and reviews what we have gained from them, their limitations, and what directions they have opened for future research. The conclusion looks at the five main theses of the book, the consequences of these theses, the limitations of the book as a whole, and the areas of future research.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book's title, Becoming Religious in a Secular Age, suggests the work's primary contribution to the study of religion. As a whole, it offers a historical ontology of religion. The “becoming” at the heart of this book is a necessarily twofold process. Even as the people of Himachal Pradesh increasingly recognize themselves as becoming religious, the target of their becoming is itself becoming. This confusing, convoluted, and creative process is the historical ontology of religion, but it is important to be clear about the ends of this becoming. Becoming religious is a process without end. This book is not to be understood as the story of the struggle by which a people became religious—that they struggled until they attained a particular state. Becoming religious is that state.

This chapter turns to the work of one of the major philosophic figures in France to have stalwartly resisted the theoretical constellation of the philosophy of difference, in part through his identification with a tradition of radical critique that calls into question the standard academic role of philosophy and redefines it as ‘the attempt to think the totality of the thinkable.’ Situating his work in relationship to the so-called structuralists and post-structuralists, it presents the fundamental stakes of his broad intellectual project by providing a succinct but comprehensive account of how his historical ontology and his defense of political autonomy form the backdrop for his writings on aesthetics and psychoanalysis.

This concluding chapter raises the question of how our concepts, metaphors, and models not only reflect but also shape the world in which we live. Memory is a particularly interesting subject because what it is, its ontology, is not independent from the way we conceive of it, and such conceptions are not independent from the cultural economy of remembering and forgetting of which they are a part. This argument is elaborated within the larger epistemological picture of memory’s “historical ontology,” a concept suggested by Ian Hacking to capture our changing ideas about the reality of entities such as memory. To concretize and illustrate this argument the discussion is based on the interpretation of a work of art, Anselm Kiefer’s Census, a memory installation that is viewed as a case study in the unstable historical ontology of memory.

Accounts of geometry are caught between the demands of history and philosophy, and are difficult to reduce to either. In a profoundly influential move, Plato used geometrical proof as one means of bootstrapping his Theory of Forms and what came to be called metaphysics, and the emergence of ontological modes of thinking. This has led to a style of thinking still common today that gets called ‘mathematical Platonism’. By contrast, the sheer diversity of mathematical practices across cultures and time has been adduced to claim their historical contingency, which has recently prompted Ian Hacking to question why there is philosophy of mathematics at all. The different roles assigned to geometrical diagrams in these debates form the focus of this chapter, which analyses in detail the contrasting discussions of diagrams, and of the linearization and spatialization of thinking, by Plato (especially Meno and the Republic), by the cognitive historian Reviel Netz, the media theorist Sybille Krämer, and the anthropologist Tim Ingold.