范笔德著的《亚洲的精神性（印度与中国的灵性和世俗）》是以印度与中国现代性中的灵性、世俗、宗教及巫术之间的关系为主旨。印度与中国社会展现的形态表明，这些关系正在塑造现代民族。社会学与政治意识形态有助于将现代民族国家及其治理的民主形态概念化为世俗的，它的形成依赖于替代共同体的宗教态度，而现在的研究并不想给民族主义与宗教假定一种既定的关系。与此相似，在现代化社会学理论和西方现代性之本质的意识形态观念中的关于世俗化与世俗主义的假设，是无法根据其表面价值来进行判断的。

In his extraordinarily influential book Orientalism, Edward Said argued that Western knowledge about the Orient in the Post-Enlightenment period has been "a systematic discourse by which Europe was able to manage-even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively." According to Said, European and American views of the Orient created a reality in which the Oriental was forced to live. Although Said's work deals primarily with discourse about the Arab world, much of his argument has been applied to other regions of "the Orient." Drawing on Said's book, Carol A. Breckenridge, Peter van der Veer, and the contributors to this book explore the ways colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and the processes through which that knowledge has shaped past and present Indian reality. One common theme that links the essays in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament is the proposition that Orientalist discourse is not just restricted to the colonial past but continues even today. The contributors argue that it is still extremely difficult for both Indians and outsiders to think about India in anything but strictly Orientalist terms. They propose that students of society and history rethink their methodologies and the relation between theories, methods, and the historical conditions that produced them. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament provides new and important insights into the cultural embeddedness of power in the colonial and postcolonial world.