Afterword

Abstract

Contributions to Indian Sociology 55, 1 (2021): 52–58 SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/ Melbourne DOI: 10.1177/00699667211000904 Derivatives are not unique in their tendency towards detachment. Academic work too, where such intellectual range and movement is essential in order to create the analytical grounds for productive comparisons and frameworks for understanding, tends to generate powerful disciplinary circuits spinning away in their own quite isolated orbits, ones that can also become increasingly detached from the contexts, lives, concepts and concerns that provided the grounds for generative engagement in the first place. Knowledge management extracts its costs from scholarly life. But perhaps it is our responsibility to worry even more about the costs of the circuits of our own making. A sense of attachment and reattachment, then, might enable us to move with the kind of responsibility that the Pacific Islanders and the people in Harda mandi expect from an exchange.