[Reader-list] [announcements] Friday, May 12th: Talk by Patricia Spyer

[PUKAR]

PUKAR

 

cordially invites you to a talk by

 

Patricia Spyer

 

on

 

Blind Faith: Painting Christianity in Post-Conflict Ambon (Indonesia)

 

 

Date:              Friday, 12th May 2006

 

Time:              6:30 PM

 

Venue:           Kitab Mahal, 4th Floor,

                        D N Road, Fort, Mumbai - 01

 

 

During the war in Ambon and since, popular Christian painters have been plastering the city's main thoroughfares and Christian neighborhood gateways with billboard portraits of Jesus and Christian murals. These artifacts perform in several capacities: as visual emblems of Christian territory, as an alternative urban counterpublic to the political and televisual prominence of Muslims nation-wide and as a mode of intervention in everyday Christian behavior. The paintings' migration from church interiors to urban public space raises questions concerning the transformations post-war of religious sensibility and the role of both mass and alternative media therein. There is a perception among Ambonese Christians that their own desperate plight may have been invisible to God himself. The gigantic Christian portraits and murals rising on the ruins of war across Ambon bear witness and give material form to Christian anxieties about invisibility while also aiming to alleviate the very condition of being unseen. Homing in on blindness as much as varied refractions of the visual, the paper also expands our understanding of what the visual might be.





 

Patricia Spyer obtained her BA in History and Anthropology at Tufts University, and her MA and PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Thereafter she was a Harper Fellow in the College of the University of Chicago, a Lecturer at the Research Centre of Religion & Society at the University of Amsterdam and, since 2001, holds the Chair of the Anthropology of Indonesia at Leiden University.

 

Her fieldwork in the Aru Islands in eastern Indonesia and archival research in the Netherlands forms the basis of her book The Memory of Trade: Modernity's Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Duke 2000). Her current ethnographic project focuses on the role of mass and small, alternative media in the conflict and postconflict situation in Ambon, Indonesia. She also co-directs, with Mary Steedly of Harvard University, a collaborative research project Signs of Crisis: Alternative media and the making of political identities in Southern Asia.

 

She has published, among other topics, on violence, historical consciousness, the media and photography, materiality and religion. Her books include Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (Routledge 1998), and the co-edited Handbook of Material Culture (Sage 2006).



PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research)
 
Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001
Telephone:: +91 (22) 5574 8152 
Fax:: +91 (22) 5664 0561
Email:: pukar at pukar.org.in
Website:: www.pukar.org.in
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20060504/af6b9493/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
announcements mailing list
announcements at sarai.net
https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements