Epilogue: Translating Universals and the Making of the Local

This epilogue reflects on the central arguments presented in the articles of this special issue. They stress how the dynamics of translation are crucial in understanding what happens to abstract universals as they travel globally across differences and encounter the realities in Southeast Asia. The authors provide ethnographic insights into the way that past (dis)entanglements between local histories and broader modernities shape local actors' perceptions, acceptance, or rejection of contemporary universals today and they highlight the frictions between local life-worlds and incoming flows of universalist ideas and models. By focusing on people's prior experiences, the articles offer an empirical, processual perspective not only on the translation and circulation of universals but also on the concept of the local as socially (re)made, historically contingent, and ever changing. Historically and socially situated actors broker, translate, and fashion their own versions of universals, sometimes repurposing them into something virtually unrecognisable to their designers.