摘要：Everything flows. So goes the famous aphorism which has been repeatedly used in academia to characterize the essence of the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ thought. This established statement often gives social scientists the luxury to make bold claims about social phenomena without any pretense of offering exhaustive analyses of the nature of social change. To claim that the social world has changed fundamentally in the last decades is a good example for this conventional practice. Since everything flows, and nothing stays the same, one would normally think that, to underline the fact that the social world is in constant change, without offering a comprehensive theoretical and historical analysis, does nothing but state the obvious. Although it is not problem free1, the concept of “the rise of the Global South”, by focusing on the empirical phenomena of the emergence of so-called formerly emerging countries, does explain the specific character of the shift the world is experiencing today on the meta-level: the world has clearly gained a multicentric character, and it is not possible to investigate the social world with a set of presupposed universalisms anymore (Rehbein, 2010). In a world in which a good number of scholars (regardless of which generation they belong to or from what disciplines and schools of thought they derive their ideas) are still, in one way or the other, bounded by old ways of imagining the social world, Religion, Community and Development: Changing Contours of Politics and Policy in India (hereafter abbreviated as ‘RCD’) comes forward as a novel effort from the scholars of one of the most important countries of the Global South, India, to unthink the conventional practices of social sciences and tries to come up with an epistemological framework which would respond to the urgent need to modify the ontological premises of yesterday’s social world (Beck, 2003).
