Event overview
A Public Lecture on doing justice to religious subjectivities in scholarly work by Kalpana Ram, Macquarie University
This lecture draws on the arguments and ethnographic work on spirit possession published in the book Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern in order to reflect on the academic division of labour between history and anthropology as well as wider questions of how the non-religious scholar might gain access to religious phenomena.
History has been held up by postcolonial critique as providing the missing dimension of temporality in anthropological discourse. Yet historiography, even when undertaken from a postcolonial subaltern standpoint, has foundered on the challenge of doing justice to religious subjectivity.
The paper turns to phenomenology to provide a different understanding of temporality, one that is capable of disclosing ways in which anthropology does in fact rely radically on time, on the capacity of the scholar´s body to slowly effect a new synthesis of time, place and people. The paper also points to what it might mean to arrive at an understanding of an unfamiliar phenomenon without any necessary involvement of consent or belief.
Kalpana Ram is a senior anthropologist at Macquarie University in Sydney. She has worked extensively on themes to do with postcolonialism, social movements and modernity in India, with specific reference to the lives of rural women in Tamil Nadu. She draws on a broad range of inter-disciplinary debates and bodies of theory, including feminism, postcolonial theory, Marxism, as well as anthropology and philosophy. A number of these themes come to an integrated fruition in her latest book Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern (University of Hawaii, 2013), which will be referred to in the talk.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Oct 2016 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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