Grammars of Marriage and Desire

Tomorrow at 12 PM BST/4.30 PM IST!

Register here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0vcOiurzsjEtVLy2cCvkG4bTfC92BitxaR

We are super excited to share our next event this term titled 'Staging Desires, Building Audience' on 14th June, at 12 PM BST/4.30 PM IST. For this fascinating session we are delighted to have with us Indu Harikumar (Induviduality), Anuja Ghosalkar with the Lonely Hearts Club, Mandeep Raikhy (Queen Size), and Ranjini Nair (Cambridge), discussing love, sexuality, desire, and its relationship with the internet and more!

Register here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0vcOiurzsjEtVLy2cCvkG4bTfC92BitxaR

We are super excited to share our next event this term titled 'Staging Desires, Building Audience' on 14th June, at 12 PM BST/4.30 PM IST. For this fascinating session we are delighted to have with us Indu Harikumar (Induviduality), Anuja Ghosalkar with the Lonely Hearts Club, Mandeep Raikhy (Queen Size), and Ranjini Nair (Cambridge), discussing love, sexuality, desire, and its relationship with the internet and more!

Register here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0vcOiurzsjEtVLy2cCvkG4bTfC92BitxaR

We are super excited to announce our next roundtable this term titled 'Can There be an Intellectual History of Hindu Marriage in Colonial India', on 17th May, 1 PM BST/5.30 PM IST.

We are delighted to welcome on board with us for this session Brian Hatcher (Tufts), Mytheli Sreenivas (Ohio), Malavika Kasturi (Toronto), and Abhinav Chandrachud (Bombay High Court). Our speakers will be in conversation with our co-convenor Shuvatri Dasgupta (Cambridge) and Alok Oak (Leiden). Together they will seek to explore diverse ways in which Hindu marriage was conceptualised in colonial India, and engage with these discourses through the lens of private property, law, social reform, and caste and gender based exclusionary practices.

Register here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUpc--srDMvG9fZDJHcGH8SYc03zlYTCC5_

And to receive our regular updates write to [email protected].

Tomorrow at 12 PM GMT/4.30 PM IST!

Register here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUodOGupzgjHNOs5EwxlmGDnT6BC1ZmFgtz

We are very excited to share our second event for Easter Term 2022, titled "Defiant Desires?: Single Studies as a Discipline", on 3rd of May, Tuesday, at 12.00 PM BST/4.30 PM IST.

We will be joined by Dr. Ketaki Chowkhani (Manipal Centre for Humanities), Dr. Katherine Fama (University College Dublin), and Dr. Craig Wyne (University of the District of Columbia). Our rich panel will speak about the discipline of Singles Studies, how they envisage it, what its politics are, and how they engage with the subject inside their classrooms.

We sincerely hope many of you will join us for this fascinating conversation!

Register here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUodOGupzgjHNOs5EwxlmGDnT6BC1ZmFgtz

And to receive our regular updates keep an eye out here, or write to [email protected].

We are very excited to share our second event for Easter Term 2022, titled "Defiant Desires?: Single Studies as a Discipline", on 3rd of May, Tuesday, at 12.00 PM BST/4.30 PM IST.

We will be joined by Dr. Ketaki Chowkhani (Manipal Centre for Humanities), Dr. Katherine Fama (University College Dublin), and Dr. Craig Wyne (University of the District of Columbia). Our rich panel will speak about the discipline of Singles Studies, how they envisage it, what its politics are, and how they engage with the subject inside their classrooms.

We sincerely hope many of you will join us for this fascinating conversation!

Register here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUodOGupzgjHNOs5EwxlmGDnT6BC1ZmFgtz

And to receive our regular updates keep an eye out here, or write to [email protected].

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our first session this term, on 'The Indian Dream Home'. Big thanks to our speakers Hena Ahmed, Kamalini Chakravarti, Sharmishtha Ghoshal, and Arushi Sinha, and our wonderful audience as always, for the fascinating questions and comments!

We have a super exciting session coming up for next week: keep an eye out here for further updates!

At 4 PM this evening!

Register now: https://bit.ly/3K69Dat

...And we are back for Easter Term 2022!

We are very excited to share our first event : A roundtable conversation on the theme 'The Indian Dream Home', on 26th of April, Tuesday, at 16.00 PM BST/8.30 PM IST.

We will be joined by Hena Ahmed (Sanmarg), Kamalini Chakravarti (Bartaman), Sharmishtha Ghoshal (Indulge The New Indian Express), and Arushi Sinha (Vogue India).

We sincerely hope many of you will join us for this fascinating conversation on the production of domesticity and conjugality in Indian media.

Register here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEtd--vqT4tHdG81-Gu7594R9n5N4_8jgMM

And to receive our regular updates, and readings, write to [email protected].

...And we are back for Easter Term 2022!

We are very excited to share our first event : A roundtable conversation on the theme 'The Indian Dream Home', on 26th of April, Tuesday, at 16.00 PM BST/8.30 PM IST.

We will be joined by Hena Ahmed (Sanmarg), Kamalini Chakravarti (Bartaman), Sharmishtha Ghoshal (Indulge The New Indian Express), and Arushi Sinha (Vogue India).

We sincerely hope many of you will join us for this fascinating conversation on the production of domesticity and conjugality in Indian media.

Register here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEtd--vqT4tHdG81-Gu7594R9n5N4_8jgMM

And to receive our regular updates, and readings, write to [email protected].

In an hour!

Register here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwoc-utpzsvEtNyL5Mfx6IYjgjqfrWdvOfY

We are super excited to share that Dr. Sean Dowdy (University of Oslo) will join us next Tuesday, on Zoom (15th March, 12PM GMT/5.30 PM IST), with his talk titled 'The Old Mother’s Sponge: Vitality Affects and the Oracularization of Desire in Mayong'.

Drawing on psychoanalytic insights far too infrequently mobilized in anthropology, Dr. Dowdy's talk proposes that ethnographers, when carefully attuned to the attunements of the people we work with, can access and interpret unconscious dynamics. The setting here concerns oracular rites in Mayong (Assam) among “tribal Hindus," particularly the bodily rhythms and enigmatic communications of goddess possession as it is undertaken by the village “oracle mother” (Ai) or “Old Mother” (Burhi Ai). The primary functions of village oracles throughout Assam and much of Northeast India are rather seductive: they broadcast the unspeakable (through revelation and play) or forecast the future (through prophetic divination). Beyond this, another and largely unspoken function operates, which we might call the regulation of the “field of desires.” When Mayongians listen to the Old Mother, allow themselves to be handled by her, and recognize in her rhythmic gyrations markers of an imprecise but nevertheless shared affective communication, something remarkable happens: her crowd and retinue become playfully childlike in their interactions and behaviors. Rather than treat this as some form of regression, this talk proposes that the Old Mother soaks up the anxiety of the crowd like the “sponge” (jika-juk) she is sometimes compared to, and returns it in two metabolized forms: (1) a display of kinetic affects—more popularly known as “vitality affects”—which resist categorization but are intelligible in terms of crescendos and decrescendos, flags and surges, bursting and shrinking, rush and release, etc.; and (2) a secondary verbal playfulness with those affects, which—in contradistinction to the kind of affective contagion that one finds amidst sorcery panics, political rites, and other forms of mass projection or introjection—allow for a space (and thus a developmental capacity) for individual desires to become realigned, regulated, and sublimated for collective ends. Following an ethnographic demonstration of this process, and the way the speaker's affects were also realigned, Dr. Dowdy proposes that there are striking political and ecological entailments of these periodic rites when the Old Mother oracularizes desire….entailments that can attend to crises of citizenship, climate, dispossession, and communal violence.

To join us, register here:
https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwoc-utpzsvEtNyL5Mfx6IYjgjqfrWdvOfY