Scrupulously based in anthropology and history – and drawing on social theory and critical thought – this book revisits the disciplines, archives, and subjects of modernity.

There are at least three interleaving emphases here. To begin with, the work rethinks institutionalized formations of anthropology and history – together with "archives" at large – as themselves intimating disciplines of modernity. Understood in the widest senses of the terms, these disciplines are constitutively contradictory.

Moreover, the study interrupts familiar projections of modern subjects as molded a priori by a disenchanted calculus of interest and reason. It tracks instead the affective, embodied, and immanent attributes of our varied worlds as formative of subjects of modernity, sown into their substance and spirit.

Finally, running through the book is a querying of entitlement and privilege that underlie social terrains and their scholarly apprehensions – articulating at once distinct elites, pervasive plutocracies, and modern "scholasticisms."