Workshop 42

Local Modernities? Articulating transnational ideas in South Asia

 

The flow of transnational concepts into South Asia has become a prevailing topic of scientific descriptions of the region. However, scientists and “local” actors both tend to perceive transnational ideas at work in South Asia as forming dichotomies with local conceptions. For example, recent threats against love couples on Valentine’s Day have become another means to showcase fundamentalist Hinduist values in Karnataka, South India. Less sensationally, residents of Chandigarh in North India negotiate the city’s modernist architecture within an opposition of “modernness” to vernacular design, the longstanding claim to the “modernity” of Chandigarh having become a “tradition” in the city itself. In this panel, instead of opposing the “local” to the transnational, we wish to reverse the focus and, by juxtaposing ethnographic examples, ask which interdependences and connections between differing “local” or transnational ideas help constitute as well as uphold these apparently hybrid settings.

We invite proposals for papers based on anthropological case studies in urban as well as rural settings, concentrating on the articulation of transnational ideas. To tackle especially South Asian constructions of the perilousness of owning the “Other”, we will focus on (but are not restricted to) such diverse, visible and fashionable transnational ideas of past and present as “liberty”, “love marriages”, “citizens’ rights”, “terrorism”, “non-smoking” and many others. We propose to analyse the enactment of these imaginations through widening concepts of cultural appropriations by including a focus on hybridities of differing values, thus foregrounding the connectivities of transnational ideas with persisting and newly introduced “local” values as a crucial part of their ongoing and vivid expression.

 

Convenors

Bärbel Högner, Institut für Ethnologie, Frankfurt am Main (mail@bhoegner.de)
Markus Schleiter, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden(mschleiter@yahoo.com)

 

Termin / Raum

Mittwoch, 30.09.2009, 15.00 bis 16.45 Uhr und 17.15 bis 19.00 Uhr / Raum 454 (Hauptgebäude)

 

Vorträge inkl. Abstracts als pdf

15:00
Markus Schleiter (Leiden): Welcome/ Introductory remarks

Transnational development at work

15:05
Ursula Münster (München): Green Imperialism? Environmental conversation and resistance in Kerala, South India

15:20
Luisa Steur (Utrecht): Traveling model of indigenism and Kerala's emergent adivasi politics

15:35
Prasanna Kumar Nayak (Bhubaneswar): New Forms of Communal Tension in Kondhmal Orissa, India

15:50
Discussion

Modern marriages

16:05
Miriam Benteler (Berlin): In Search of Cross Cousin Marriage: The kinship system of the Latin catholics in Central Kerala as an example of cultural appropriation

16:20
Phillip Zehmisch (München): Andaman Loves: Establishing alternative “modernities” and “traditions” on an island

16:35
Discussion

16:45
Coffee Break

Love and soccer: South Asian mediations

17:15
Christiane Brosius (Heidelberg): Un/Dressing Valentine: Negotiating romantic love and morality in urban India

17:30
Christoph Gabler (Berlin): Understanding the real thing: The process of identification among Indian football fans in times of global imagination industries

17:45
Discussion

Appropriating modernities

18:00
Katja Rieck (Frankfurt): Appropriating Progress? Radhakamal Mukherjee`s vision of post-colonial India as village-writ-large

18:15
Sandra Bärnreuther (Heidelberg): Home or Hospital? Negotiating childbirth in rural Ladakh

18:30
Bärbel Högner (Frankfurt): From dhobi gath to laundromat: Ideas on modernization and "westernization" among a washermen community in North India

18:45
Final Discussion

19:00
End

 

We are grateful to the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden for co-sponsoring the workshop by a travel grant for the presentation by Luisa Steur.