Understanding “Roots and Routes” from a Post-Kantian Tradition of Critique

Abstract

This essay aims to understand Ananta Kumar Giri’s notions of roots and routes from a post-Kantian tradition of critique as regulative ideas and to show their possibilities to address problems of politics, culture, and society, stemming from nationalist and ethnic self-assertion, within a globalized and transmodern world, specifically, to avoid the common pitfalls of violence and absolutism in the processes of political, social, and cultural mobilization predicated upon ideas of ethnicity and nation. It tries to show—pace common sense—how roots and routes are interrelated, specifically, how there are routes in all our roots and how being with routes does not necessarily produce rootless histories and modernities and, on this basis, to show furthermore how we can understand self, ethnicity, and nation at the cross-roads of roots and routes.