Hybridity and Simultaneity in the Global South

This chapter explores and furthers the debate on hybridity, analysing the enactment of authority rather than interactions between things and entities. We introduce the notion of simultaneity of discourse and practice to articulate the process through which seemingly contradictory sources of authority are played out to constitute political order. This model, built up around the enactment of authority, suggests a model for reading dialogically concepts such as bureaucracy and kinship. Inherent to this process is a perpetual tension between difference and affinity. It is the dynamism of this tension that defines the hybrid order's quality of simultaneity. This approach more accurate captures the syncretism and hybridity of order-making than current debates on hybridity that often either reproduce the binaries that the concept challenges or lose analytical vigor by stating that everything and everyone are hybrid.