September 23
Dr. Michael Carnahan
Senior Adviser to the Finance Minister, Government of Afghanistan
"Winning
both the war on terror and the war on drugs in Afghanistan"
September
30
Brian
Spooner, Professor of Anthropology
Museum Curator for Near Eastern Ethnology
University of Pennsylvania
"Looking
For "Culture" in all the Wrong Places: a return to Fieldnotes
a Decade Later"
Based on her documentation
of the Tamil post-funeral ceremony in the early 1990s, Isabelle
Clark-Deces speaks about the difficulties of searching for anthropological
categories of meaning
October
13
Shahid Amin, Professor of History, University of Delhi
'Domesticating
the Turkish Conquest of North India: a Warrior saint and the Women
of the Gangetic Plain'
October
14
Kathleen
M. Erndl, Associate Professor
Department of Religion, Florida State University
“The Play of the Mother: Possession and Power
in Hindu Women’s Goddess Rituals”
In
the Kangra Valley area of Himachal Pradesh, as in many other regions
of India, it is not uncommon for women to become possessed by
a goddess, to speak with her voice, and to act as healers and
mediums in their communities. Divine possession as a form of religious
expression is interconnected with such practices as pilgrimage
to temples, puja (image worship), recitation of sacred texts,
fasting, and meditation that comprise the bhakti (devotion) and
tantra (esotericism) oriented religious complex of Saktism or
Goddess worship in the region.
Some of the questions considered will be: To what extent do women’s
ritual activities, especially those connected with Goddess possession,
articulate a discourse that reproduces, legitimates, and validates
the social order (i.e. the elite Brahminical ideology of women’s
subordination), and to what extent do they articulate a discourse
that challenges, alters, and transforms the social order? To what
extent do these rituals reflect women’s roles in the domestic
sphere, and to what extent to they transgress these boundaries?
How does Goddess possession transform women’s identities
and socio-religious roles? In what sense are goddess-possessed
women and their devotees powerful?
I begin with the premise that the possession experience is continuous
with ordinary lived experience, so that women’s experience
in a possession ritual both influences and is influenced by their
everyday lives. Moreover, I argue against the so-called deprivation
theory, proposed by anthropologist I.M. Lewis and other scholars,
which holds that women and other low status people turn to possession
and other ecstatic religious expressions in order to compensate
for their relative lack of power in secular life. Besides simply
noting the fact that many high status women, as well as men, are
involved in ecstatic religious practices in the Hindu context,
I argue that religious or spiritual power is valid in its own
right, not inferior to or derivative of economic or social power
and that religious and secular power are not completely separable
and often reinforce each other
October
18
David
Ludden, Professor of History
University of Pennsylvania
“Hindutva
after the 2004 Lok Sabha Elections”
"The
Importance of Friendship in the Mahabharata."
November
4
Ann
Grodzins Gold, Professor
Department of Religion and Department of Anthropology
Syracuse University
“Deep beauty: Elusive females in goddess shrine
origin tales”
In
2003, I recorded origin tales and miracle tales at about twenty
regional Rajasthani shrines. These vary delightfully, but one
of the more common motifs is a female who evades the touch or
gaze of a pursuing male by sinking into rocks, where her shrine
is later established and her power emerges. The actual circumstances
of pursuit and descent may differ enormously. Exploring permutations
of this sequence, I focus on one Rajasthani goddess, Sundar Mata
("Beautiful Mother") whose story I tracked from several
established, offshoot shrines back to her original vanishing place.
Along the way slight variations in each rendition of the story
shift its meanings to deliver positioned sociological and theological
commentaries. What might vernacular mythologies teach us about
gender, power, locality and hierophany?
November
11
James
Fitzgerald, Professor and Associate Head,
Department of Religious Studies
University of Tennessee
“The Unknown Yudhisthira
of the Mahabharata”
December
2
Philip Lutgendorf
Associate Professor, and Co-Chair, South Asian Studies Program,
University of Iowa
"Something Fishy About Hanuman: How Sexuality Still Sometimes
Swims around the Ramayana's Reservoir of Brahmacarya"
Among
the Ramayana's second-tier characters, Hanuman has come to enjoy
a unique status as the recipient of popular worship throughout
much of India. Central to his religious role as an embodiment
and facilitator of "power and devotion" (sakti and bhakti)
is his "unbroken celibacy"(akhand brahmacarya), which
is frequently invoked in texts in his praise, visually coded in
the "tightly-bound" loincloth visible on his images
(sometimes labelled an "adamantine chastity-belt"or
vajra kaupin), and articulated in the ideology of his numerous
pahalvan (wrestler) and sadhu devotees (among others). Such expressions
and celebrations of chastity form part of the wider South Asian
discourse on self-control and especially on male strength through
semen-retention, of which Hanuman is considered a preceptor and
exemplar. Yet the abundant folklore which also celebrates the
monkey hero, both in South and Southeast Asia, reveals lingering
concerns about the misogyny that often comfortably coexists with
patriarchal brahmacarya ideology. Such concern particularly resurfaces
in a piscine female who retains a shadowy existence in numerous
legends as an unacknowledged "wife" of Hanuman and as
the mother of his acknowledged "son." This paper will
argue that this vestigial acknowledgment of the simian and human
norm and of the dominant householder lifestyle suggests not merely
the curious persistence of paradoxical motifs in Hindu mythology,
but a lingering counter-mythology of the divine monkey that problematizes
ascetic and misogynist paradigms. This lecture is open to the
public.
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