[Reader-list] SociologySeminar at SAU: Bhrigupati Singh

[Diya Mehra]

The
Department of Sociology, South Asian University cordially invite you to a
seminar:

Poverty
and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India 

By
Bhrigupati
Singh, Brown University

Wednesday, 23rd September,
2015, 2:30 pm, FSI Hall, South Asian University, Akbar Bhawan, Chanakyapuri,
New Delhi

In this talk
the author discusses their recent book Poverty and the Quest for Life (Oxford
University Press, 2015). Set in Shahabad, an area of extreme poverty in rural Rajasthan,
and focusing on the Sahariyas, a community of former bonded laborers, this book
asks what the terms “aspiration” and “quality of life” might mean within such a
milieu. The book answers this question by taking the reader through a range of
themes including ways of conceptualizing state power and everyday encounters
with the state (beyond a fixation on corruption and sovereign authority), the
decline of forests and the water table, the contestations but also the intimacies
of inter-caste sociality, the rise and fall of gods, and the place of religious
practice in everyday life. This book offers new ways of thinking beyond the
religion-secularism and nature-culture dichotomies, juxtaposing questions about
quality of life with political theologies of sovereignty, neighborliness, and
ethics, in the process painting a rich portrait of perseverance and fragility
in contemporary rural India.

Bhrigupati
Singh studied at Delhi University, SOAS (UK) and completed his PhD in
anthropology at Johns Hopkins University in 2010. He is currently an Assistant
Professor of cultural anthropology at Brown University. His recent book
titled Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in
Rural India (Oxford University Press, South Asia; University of
Chicago Press, US & UK, 2015) was awarded the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the
Indian Social Sciences. He is the co-editor of The
Ground Between: Anthropological Engagements
with Philosophy (Duke University Press, 2014) and serves as an
Associate Editor of HAU: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory. Previously, he worked at Sarai-CSDS (Delhi). He
is currently conducting research on religious and secular forms of healing for
“common mental health disorders” including depression and anxiety, as a window
into contemporary India.