not denominate territories, as in most other definitions.⁶⁹ Instead, it differ
entiates communication, and a territory will therefore never be peripheral itself, but can be referred to as such. I will discuss what can be gained from observing (scholarly) communication as differentiated into centre and peri
phery, without confusing sociological with topological meanings.
When selfreflexive communication about centres and peripheries points at territories, and these references are reproduced very often, they are sta
bilised. My project unavoidably adds to this reproduction in the case of Southeast African SSH (Chapter 4), but I hope that the following discussion of concepts and their reconceptualisation will destabilise these semantics even more so.
amples include Mount Meru, in Hindu mythology, which is positioned in the centre of the universe and is the axis of the world where the deities reside and Hindus wait for their reincarnation after death. The ‘UralAltaic peoples also know of a central mountain, Sumeru, to whose summit the polestar is fixed’ (Eliade 1959, p. 12). Zoroastrian beliefs hold that the sacred mountain Hara Berezaiti (in today’s Iran) is situated at the centre of the earth and is linked with heaven. The need to define the centre of the world seems to exist in many different cultures (Anderson 1991, p. 13).
Centres are perceived of as ‘crossroads of the world, bringing together di
verse traditions and serving as communication nodes for wider areas […].
Cities may be centers in particular ways to particular people, dispersed in a transnational periphery’ (Hannerz 2015, p. 309).
There is a important difference between these examples: the question is, whether a people imposes their definition of the centre upon other people who share neither their faith, nor their emperor. At least for the Roman Empire with the ‘divine intelligence’ of the citizens of Rome (as described by Vitruvius in De Architectura), and the Christian crusaders in the Euro
pean Middle Ages, this imposition is an undisputed historical fact.
The present concept of periphery, meaning the fringe area, was intro
duced to various European languages in the 17th century (Kluge, Seebold et al. 2012) at the time of the European colonisation of the Americas. The word itself developed from the Greek and Latin words for ‘circular line’, and, later, ‘moving something circularly’, which implies a centre to encircle.
It can also be argued that the distinction centre/periphery is a successor to the distinction Greek/barbaros, or, respectively, to Sanskrit/barbaras,⁷⁰ referring to those who do not speak the language (properly), and whose customs differ. Increasingly, Greek orators referred to ‘barbarians’ derogat
orily, and in relation to slaves deported from the shores of the Black Sea (see the different contributions in Harrison 2002). The Archaic Greek might have been the first people who defined their centre ex negativo, making use of the other to protect their own position.
70 Though here, being not as clear cut; see Thapar 1971.
Koselleck defines asymmetric antonyms as pair of self and otherreferen
ces, in which the otherreference lacks appreciation (Koselleck 1975). In ex
treme cases, concepts of self and/or otherreferences are stylised to appear singular, like in the case of the divinely intelligent Romans, to serve its pur
pose of increasing the capacity to act (politically) as a group, as ‘we’. Kosel
leck (ibid., pp. 75 sqq.) also describes how Diogenes’ universal concept of the cosmopolitan, after the conquering of ‘barbarian lands’, in order to integrate its people, grants a positive connotation to the ‘barbarian’ as natural, sincere and pure human, for purposes of selfcriticism. This con
ceptual transformation is reversed when the Imperium Romanum makes use of the concept to name the other, those who are beyond its borders.
According to Koselleck, the ‘barbarian’ in a pair of asymmetric antonyms also served more recent imperialisms as a tool to shield and expand one’s own position. In National Socialism, the same function was fulfilled by the asymmetric antonyms of Aryan/NonAryan. Since there is no previ
ous political, historical or cultural definition of ‘Aryan’, its negation is a very clear negation of one’s own position. Only those in power could fill the conceptual vacuum.⁷¹
At the end of the 18th century, the idea of the primitive is manifested with the help of the differentiation between the colonisers and the colon
ised, as well as a temporal difference: that ‘anthropologists are “here and now,” their objects of study are “there and then,” and that the “other” exists in a time not contemporary with our own’ (Fabian 1983, dustjacket text).
The ‘primitive’ and the ‘savage’ become synonymous with backwardness and underdevelopment, of being located outside of Europe and outside of civilisation and modernity (also see e. g. Mignolo 2009b; Said 1978). In the 18th century, in ‘Liberal mainstream thinking, Europeans had a right and a duty to “civilise” nonEuropeans’ (Pelizzon and Somel 2016, p. 830;
also see Constantine 1966). Looking at their function of othering, the distinctions ‘Greek/barbarian’, ‘civilised/primitive’ and ‘developed/devel
71 In the German original, Koselleck 1975, p. 103, writes: ‘Damit war eine elastische Negativfigur umschrieben, deren Zuordnung allein in der Verfügungsgewalt dessen lag, der die Macht hatte, den sprachlichen Leerposten oder Blindbegriff zu besetzen’.
oping’ (or ‘developed/underdeveloped’) indicate one continuous line of thinking, with different ‘policy features’, depending on the dominant ideo
logy of the time, in Europe. The ‘other’ is always lacking skills and culture, is imperfect, and can only hope to get rid of this status by adapting to the favoured side of the distinction. While this is partly true for ‘centre/peri
phery’, too, this distinction is more complex, at least for some authors, since it can be nested, as I will account for later. One of the first to make extensive use of the dual concept of centre/periphery in the SSH, but pro
moting a rather flat view of the distinction, was Shils’ conceptualisation.
Shils, in his Essays in Macrosociology (1975; also see Shils 1972), interest
ingly, focuses on introspection and values to explain the distinction: the centre, or metropolis, is identified as a realm of symbols, beliefs and values that map one’s own position, specifically the position of intellectuals, in relation to that centre. Selfvalue depends on how close or far the distance appears on this inner map, since the periphery is identified as unimaginat
ive, unpolished and narrow, while the metropolis stands for the opposite, including the roles and institutions propagating the related values. Shils does not explain instructively where these beliefs come from, nor what their consequences are, in a macrosociological perspective.