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This chapter considers not only how a new image of the Russian provinces took shape in literary texts. But it also looks at how these texts insisted that the image was old. By the 1830s, not only is it assumed that the provinces epitomize all that is grimly familiar, it is further assumed that such has always been the case, and that everyone has always known it. In the texts analyzed here, the supposedly timeless, ahistorical nature of provintsiia becomes both a stereotype and a preoccupation. And in a slightly later period, this is the image of provintsiia that will come to serve as a static non-modernity against which other forms of time and historicalness take on value.

After summarizing the book’ s overall case for an ontological turn in history, the conclusion briefly discusses four wider intellectual implications of this paradigm shift. First, this shift fundamentally changes the way we think about the past, from an ongoing story of a single humanity, inhabiting a single, continuous metaphysical conjuncture, to stories of multiple different humanities, each one inhabiting its own distinct world of experience. Second, the shift duly changes our sense of the relationship between present and past, whereby our modern world is no longer the ultimate telos of our species journey but an exotic metaphysical anomaly, a world that is no more “true to life/nature” than any other. Third, the shift lends significant support to broader calls for a more post-disciplinary intellectual environment, since it implicitly questions the modern metaphysical commitments which undergird our entire apparatus of mainstream knowledge production and its conventional division of intellectual labor. Finally, the paradigm shift can make a significant contribution to contemporary critical theory. By forcing us to take seriously the metaphysical and ontological commitments of extinct past peoples, it raises the possibility of a non-modern critique of the modern. Moreover, by drawing our attention to the past’ s many different ways of being human, it should significantly broaden our capacity to imagine more sustainable, more equitable worlds of the future.

The book’s point of departure is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) claim that the analytical tools of our mainstream historicism are irredeemably Eurocentrist, thereby causing us to lose the experiences of non-western peoples in translation. It aims to build on this postcolonial critique of historicism in three ways. First, our conventional historicist devices are not just Eurocentrist but essentially modernist. They cause us to lose in translation the experiences of all non-modern peoples, non-western and western alike. Second, this modernism is problematic specifically because it authorizes us to align non-modern realities with our own peculiarly modern ontological commitments, fundamentally altering the contents of those realities in the process. Third, to produce histories that are more ethically defensible, philosophically robust, and historically meaningful, we need to take an ontological turn in our practice. We need to analyse each non-modern lifeworld on its own ontological terms, in its own metaphysical conjuncture, according to its own particular standards of truth and realness. To support these three claims, the book uses the proverbially western lifeworld of classical Athens (ca. 480-320 BC) as its primary case study.

Moreover, standard histories of Athens are riddled with the same kinds of problems that postcolonial critics have seen in the mainstream “histories” of non-western lifeworlds. To support this claim, the chapter considers three especially influential accounts of the formation of the Athenian politeia. In all three cases, this process is quite explicitly historicized as a story of modern-style “democratization,” as a progressive extension of a political or civic equality to every (male) Athenian, even though this account is quite strenuously resisted by all of our ancient sources. More generally, much as the postcolonial critique of historicism would lead us to expect, when we historicize demokratia as “democracy,” we inevitably end up figuring Athens as an incomplete or imperfect anticipation of a modern lifeworld, never as a fully realized version of itself.

Part One concludes by suggesting that the ultimate source of all these analytical problems is our standard modern template of social being. And the ultimate problem with this historicist model is that it imposes modern, dualist metaphysical conditions upon all non-modern realities, thereby authorizing us to align those realities with our own modern ontological commitments, fundamentally altering their contents in the process. The net result is a practice that homogenizes the past’s many different ways of being human by translating them all into the same peculiarly modern terms. Moreover, there is no obvious alternative practice available. Even the more theoretically informed forms of current historical practice, like mainstream cultural history, discursive history, and the “new materialist history,” likewise oblige us to re-engineer realities at the ontological level, since they too remain committed to a peculiarly modern metaphysical dualism. To produce histories that are more ethically defensible, more philosophically robust, and more historically meaningful, we need to take an ontological turn in our practice. As a number of influential anthropologists have recently proposed, we need to employ a more “recursive” mode of analysis, one that can make sense of each non-modern world on its own ontological terms, in its own original metaphysical conjuncture, as a more or less autonomous world unto itself. In Parts Two and Three, the book will consolidate the anthropologists’ case for this move in a number of ways.