15/03/2022
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
