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What characterises many studies that invoke the local can be described as a logic of transcendence. This logic of transcendence does not reject nor disregard the local. Rather, it af rms the centrality of the local. At the same time, the focus is on how the local is historically transcended into higher levels of generality and abstraction; the argument is that only through attention to these higher levels that the meanings of the local become clear. In contrast, the other local which we refer to in this essay is a set of practices which emerges in intimate relationship to nationalism, which in some ways even sustains nationalism, even though the places it produces cannot be understood within the same logic of transcendence. At times, this other local refers to the political and conceptual practices that emerged at the limits of the abstract time and space that constituted nationalism. At other times, this local refers to the marginal in order to represent nationhood anew. Nationhood does not exhaust, sublate or transcend this local; rather, this local continues to live, in the era of nationhood, not so much outside the national, but beyond and alongside it. This other local is explored in this essay by discussing the cases of Germany and India.

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I Germans chewed gum before World War I, but it was only after 1925, the year in which American chewing gum manufacturer William Wrigley opened a factory in Frankfurt am Main, that the product and its annoying use became truly widespread. 'Divided in the popular referenda, the Germans appear to want to become for Wrigley a united nation of gum chewers', wrote cultural critic Ernst Lorsy of the new craze. 'The Fordson tractor lags far behind Wrigley's Spearmint.' 1 Lorsy decried the coming of the 'hour of chewing gum', arguing it was the result both of a massive advertising campaign and of the Germans' desire to chase (or taste) anything that smacked of American culture. Serious political consequences followed, according to Lorsy, who attributed American workers' lack of revolutionary ardour to the fact that their jaws were too busy to allow their minds to work. Surely chewing gum would have the same unfortunate effects in Germany. Critiques of the kind Lorsy developed appeared in many different variations and with reference to scores of different objects, images and practices in the 1920s. Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin gained praise, both from contemporaries and (even more) from subsequent generations of readers, for their perspicacious observations on the commercial culture of the era. But there were many more commentators, labouring away in the trenches of illustrated magazine publishing and the daily press, in popular novels and in travel literature, who were concerned with such issues. From cars 2 to cigarettes, from tourist guidebooks 3 to furniture, the issue of what to consume and why and how to consume it garnered enduring and often contentious interest. Those concerns were not unprecedented, of course. Economic prosperity-its extent, form and