Review of A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States byGyanendra PandeyPandeys A History of Prejudice without a question is a book with good intentions. Framed in the discussion of democracy and the modern principle of equal rights, Pandey seeks to shows the contradictions that impact populations that are excluded from a full participation within democratic societies, and are subject of different kinds of prejudice. At the same time, he tries to expose how internal differences shape these conditions of exclusion, and how intolerance, discrimination, violence and discourse inscribe these contradictions on peoples bodies. However, Pandey simultaneously seems to be occluding some important processes that shape prejudice and its dynamics. For a practical point of view, I will considered this book as a political intervention and not as a deep study on the matter. As my approach to anthropology is mainly realist and materialist, his strong claims of social constructionism make me abandon any intent to engage him in a more systematic critique on method or theory. Thus Im going to highlight some of his problematic conceptions on the issue of prejudice and discrimination and the political effect of them. I will offer comments on three subjects that I see as problematic in Pandey arguments: (1) the idea of high integration of modernity (2) the absence of deeper socioeconomic reading of the class problem and (3) the strange narrative on which Pandey speaks about internal contradictions on these communities. On the issue of high integration of modernity, one of the first arguments that Pandey puts forward is that there is two kind of prejudice in modern societies: vernacular (local, relatively visible, sometimes acknowledge) and the universal that is more widespread and seen as natural by the political community. This universal would be the language of law and the state and it passes as the common sense of modern society, therefore rarely acknowledge as prejudice (p.1). The universal/common sense is produced by the state as the main institutional that fosters this kind or discourse or practice or prejudice (we never know exactly what kind of common sense hes referring to; could be Wittgenstein, Heller, Schutz, Geertz or Gramsci, for naming a few). This prejudice can be considered as the subjectivation of the individual as an unmarked citizen, which has been granted full rights by the benevolent state and can participate in civil society. This same state helms and holds together the process of modernity, coordinating markets, media, armies, schools and academia. These institutions are functionally integrated for the production of different domination effects, being one of them the tendency of universal prejudice. Pandey, echoing other subaltern studies scholars, says that when there is an excess of violence, which is the real support of modernity (lets not forget the theories that relies upon foundational acts of violence to establish a norm Freud, Girard, Benjamin, etc-), that events are called an exception or an abomination. The exception is the practical and controlled suspension of the law, the abomination is the element that should be addresses and suppress by virtue to purify the political community. Part of the Pandeys argument is that abomination is related to the notion of relic of the past, or may be call as an issue of co-temporality; that is, when two temporality coexist, and the dominant one tries to bring to the present the one that is considered as a relic or vestige of the past. The problem with this, is that while this could be true in the case of India or United States, this kind of institutional arrangement or coordination is just one of the several possibilities within modernity; for the emergence of prejudice within a polity, neither the centrality of the state or law, nor a highly integrated institutional order are necessary or sufficient condition. Culturalism and Post-structuralisms arguments have the tendency to replicate functionalist assumptions, for example, the myth of the social integration. This assumption states that social order and the reproduction of social institutions depends in a highly integrated society, this means that contradictions cannot be sustain between key institutions; and that was even knew by Weber, Durkheim and more clearly Merton (in 1949!). They show that contradiction permeates social orders, and in fact, we cannot correlate effects with explanations that rest upon high institutional integration. Personally, I dont have a profound knowledge of neither North American, nor Indian history. However, I find deeply troubling and suspicious the absence of the dimension of contradiction within a systemic level (as contradictions between market and state, churches and state, and so on and so forth). We have to be aware that these contradictions not only create shades of prejudice, but in the other hand, establish conditions for intervention and reformulation of modern political projects. Political projects that are neither common sense, not seems as natural, neither by the included or the excluded. At least in Chile, different approaches to the question of political participation had been held at different historical moments, and at the same time, Chilean popular classes had sustained different opinions that were far from an unspeakable common sense or just inscribed on the unconsciousness or the body. The conflation between modernity and liberalism, and the monolithic and superficial interpretation of the liberal modern project are obstacles for political assessment. Regarding my second critique, I found also problematic the differentiation between middle classes and lower classes within excluded or marked communities. Pandey argues that while lower classes within the universal prejudice influence are affected by something similar to underserving poor trope, middle classes are subject of a trauma effect, as the old categories still are used to marked them to maintain the existing social order and persistent boundaries between racially or socially segregated communities. However, Pandey tells us little about who these middle classes are or how these middle classes came to be, beyond general historical data. The demarcation criteria is weak, and we dont know how socio-economical positions that support these descriptions of low or middle are shaping the shared imagination on prejudice and exclusion. In these sense, openness, desirability, regularity and the narratives on social mobility, both upwards or horizontal, are important and have causal influence on the dispositions of collective action based on ethnic, racial or national grounds. Rural middle classes, business classes and professional classes have been observed as maintaining different tendencies when confronted with political situations. I think that is not enough to engage with this kind of structural inquiries as footnotes, accidents or anecdotes within a life history. For a real political intervention is necessary to acknowledge when clear patterns of event, empirical and non-empirical, are manifested, otherwise we only are describing the experience of misery, and not with the particular articulation of mechanisms that caused it. Concerning my third critique, when dealing with internal contradiction of the subaltern movements, Pandey highlights the internal contradiction (in a semantic level) and struggles (in a psychological level) of subaltern subjects. The concrete manifestation of that phenomena is the more complicated relation that subaltern subjects have with the identity that movements build as a communal symbol and a political tool. Although its important to recognize problems as internal suppression of dissent or the lack of different voices within political movements, Pandry seems eager to congratulate himself for just showing this situation. I would argue that the political aspect of the particular within the different and successive universals is already a common theme for social and historical sciences. In that sense, maybe its a generational problem and my perspective is shaped by growing up in late capitalism and the grown of the postmodern critique, but its clear for me that this type of intervention makes little impact in the academic environment. Currently, scholars already are pursuing questions on the relation between different structures, and the reactive quality of the enablement and constrain forces of these.Finally, we have to be careful. The politics of academic rhetoric compel Pandry to partially acknowledge these points. However, his treatment of them usually end as small sections, footnotes or more closing remarks. A closer inspection of the state of the art should yield that this marginalia are not really powerful end or side notes, but a more common sense in current academia.