[Reader-list] Invitation to a Book Discussion on 'Fertile Disorder' on 15 January 2018 at CSDS

[Praveen Rai]

*Centre for the Study of Developing Societies*

invites you to a book discussion on





*Fertile Disorder *

*Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern*
by Kalpana Ram

Discussants: *Udaya Kumar*

*Dhivya Janarthanan & Rajan Krishnan*





*Prathama Banerjee* will Chair

Monday, 15 January 2018, 4 pm

CSDS Seminar
Room
*RSVP*

29 Rajpur Road, Delhi
110054                                                      Tel: 011
23942199

Please join us for tea at 3.30
pm                                                    email: jaya at csds.in

*__________________________________________________________________*



*Fertile Disorder* brings together ethnographic work in rural Tamil Nadu
with debates generated in India by Marxist historiography, feminist theory
and anthropology and with the work of key post-structuralists in
deconstructive understandings of human subjectivity. These tools are used
to explore the workings of power - of caste, class, gender as well as the
work of the state and ‘state intellectuals’ in rural modernising
initiatives. The book sets out to explore the weaknesses in a purely
deconstructive approach and to advance constructive alternatives. Using the
narratives of women’s lives in rural communities, it turns to an unlikely
source of inspiration in building up a fresh account of agency and
experience - namely, the phenomenon of spirit possession, which plays a
vital role in the lives of the women portrayed in the book. In the process,
it also becomes a meditation on the way in which a dominant version of
modernity has selectively expelled certain aspects of people’s religious
lives which are thereby drained of meaning and rendered vulnerable to being
turned into ‘minor practices’ that lack a discourse of their own in the
dominant discourses of the day.



*Kalpana Ram *is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Macquarie University,
Sydney.



*Udaya Kumar* is Professor at Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi.



*Dhivya Janarthanan *is Assistant Professor at Department of Sociology,
University of Delhi.



*Rajan Krishnan *is Associate Professor at School of Culture and Creative
Expressions, Ambedkar University, Delhi.


*Prathama Banerjee* is Associate Professor at Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies, Delhi.


-- 
Praveen Rai
Academic Secretary
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road
Delhi - 110054
Phone: 91-11-23942199
http://www.csds.in/praveen.rai