2021
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Friday, December 17, 2021 Ludlow 301 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5 This presentation explores the dynamic mode in which landscape, ritual and narrative co-create and shape each other in Hindu traditions. Considering several examples of pilgrimage in India, this paper delves into the way that narratives are experienced through rituals that shape and are shaped by sacred landscapes. I end with an example from my dissertation about an 18th century devotional poet, Vengamamba, who was deeply embedded in, and in turn shaped the ritual landscape of, the south Indian pilgrimage site that she inhabited. Aalekhya Malladi is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. Her dissertation, “Devotee, Yogini, Goddess: Tarigonda Vengamamba and her Transformations,” explores the texts and the life histories of devotional poet Vengamamba (1735–1817), and conceives of a distinct female perspective on devotion and detachment. This project also examines her hagiographies and the rituals performed at her shrine, which illuminate the way that her at-times transgressive compositions and life histories have been tamed and curtailed by a hagiographical tradition that shapes her life into that of an “ideal female devotee.” She held the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship in 2019-2020. Prior to her doctoral studies, Aalekhya received an MA from Columbia University and a BA from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. |
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Wednesday, December 15, 2021 Ludlow 301 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5 My talk will comprise two parts. In the first part, I will introduce the audience to the interrelated issues of divinization and individuation in Hinduism. As is well known, the Hindu pantheon is composed of an innumerable number of deities but what does it mean to say that these deities are distinct or separate from each other? Are they really all that different? We may even ask a prior question, what does investing an entity with the properties of a divine being entail? The first part will guide the audience to some of the key issues that arise in the consideration of these questions. The second part will briefly explore the possibilities and limits of this idea of divinization as they emerge in the fraught, but also illuminating, context of the deification of the custom of widow burning or sati in contemporary India. Swayam Bagaria is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the College Fellows Program at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2020. His current book project is on the relation between popular Hinduism and ethnoreligious nationalism in India. |
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Friday, December 10, 2021 Ludlow, 3rd Floor Conference Room 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EST/GMT-5 The word guru comes close to what we might call an empty signifier: a word that is used so variably and in such a diverse array of contexts that it loses all meaning. And yet, to their followers, students and devotees, gurus can signify “life, the universe and everything.” In this talk, I will present an historic case of misapprehension of the figure of the guru in order to reflect upon the guru as a sovereign figure. In examining a colonial-era court case, I will hope to reveal the lineaments of a forgotten history of monastic power in India. The figure of the guru, properly historicized, is a productive site for the understanding of an alternative vision of normative power, wielded by the monastery, that operated through the ethical self-formation of its subjects. In this historical case, we see how the medieval monastery articulated a vision of totalizing religious power that was misapprehended by the colonial state, and indeed continues to be misapprehended to this day. I argue that this misapprehension prevents us from recognizing the monastery as an enduring institution of unparalleled power, and the guru as a particular paradigm of sovereignty. Nabanjan Maitra is Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas, Austin, where he teaches courses on the Religions of South Asia and Sanskrit. He holds a PhD in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago with a focus on Hinduism. His book project, The Rebirth of Homo Vedicus, examines the formulation and implementation of a novel form of monastic power in a medieval south India monastery. The study explains the underlying logic of ethical self-formation as the driver of the totalizing vision of power that the monastery, with the guru as its sovereign head, administered. It shows the primacy of this mode of governance in the emergence of Hinduism in the colonial period. His research and teaching attempt to situate and explicate Hinduism of the present—the local and the global—in longer histories of texts, institutions and conduct. |
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Monday, November 29, 2021 Christopher Lindner, Director, Bard Archeology Field School, and Archeologist in ResidenceJoin Bard College's resident archaeologist for a video presentation about the College's Native American archaeological site: The Enchanted Forest. Conducted by students from the Fall 2020 semester, the video explores some of the artifacts uncovered and techniques replicated that help us understand Bard's Indigenous history and how our present and future relationships with those communities should be understood. Please visit the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion website for a full list of events marking National Native American Heritage Month at Bard College. |
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Thursday, November 18, 2021 Peace is the goal for every country, community, and, hey, family. (See, we're funny here at BGIA.) In general, peace is the absence of war and violence. Through its work on the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Framework, the Institute for Economics and Peace takes peace and peace building further. It focuses on strengths not deficits and individual action on creating and sustaining positive societies. Join us on Thursday, November 18 at 12pm for an hour long Positive Peace Workshop. In this workshop, participants will learn how to better think about actions and approaches to creating peaceful societies. It will focus on policy, strategy, and implementation. If you're interested in conflict resolution, policymaking, and peace building, don't miss this virtual event. RSVP required. |
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Saturday, October 16, 2021 Online Event 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 What we know as Santeria is a rich, ancestral form of spirituality that has been around for centuries and brought by the enslaved people of Africa to the Caribbean. In this panel, we will break the stigma of Santeria and learn together about this ancient faith! |
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Wednesday, October 6, 2021
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Come enjoy CIDER DONUTS and CONVERSATION with students and faculty from the Anthropology Program. * Anthropology majors, feel free to bring friends who have been asking you what Anthropology is all about! * |
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Tuesday, September 14, 2021 Online Event 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Although white supremacist movements have received renewed public attention since the 2017 violence in Charlottesville and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, they need to be placed in deeper historical context if they are to be understood and combated. In particular, the rise of these movements must be linked to the global war on terror after 9/11, which blinded counterextremism authorities to the increasing threat they posed. In this panel, two prominent sociologists, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee, trace the growth of white supremacist extremism and its expanding reach into cultural and commercial spaces in the U.S. and beyond. They also examine these movements from the perspective of their members’ lived experience. How are people recruited into white supremacist extremism? How do they make sense of their active involvement? And how, in some instances, do they seek to leave? The answers to these questions, Miller-Idriss and Blee suggest, are shaped in part by the gendered and generational relationships that define these movements. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is Professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). Kathleen Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. If you would like to attend, please register here. Zoom link and code will be emailed the day of the event. |
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Wednesday, April 28, 2021 Please join us to recognize this remarkable achievement. Zoom Link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86439563616 |
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Thursday, April 8, 2021 Online Event 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 In this joint presentation, an anthropologist-writer and an artist-anthropologist reflect on aspects of their extraordinary collaboration in the making of Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning, a graphic novel rooted in nonfiction comprised of fictionalized encounters with writers, philosophers, activists and anthropologists. The collaboration and its published book are unique in bringing together serious scholarship and contemporary aesthetics, elevating the graphic genre by presenting complex philosophical and political themes in a mixed media format. In this presentation, the artist and the author describe the process of their artistic creation, an exceptional experiment in art, aesthetics and anthropology. Designed to reach multiple audiences, the book conveys the drama of the world in dark times and difficult circumstances even as it reveals spaces of excitement and hope. The reflections on the production process in this presentation provide insight into innovative ways of demonstrating the relevance of scholarship to real-world concerns, and how to take advantage of multimodal formats to produce, disseminate and receive knowledge in the interest of a more just, ethical world. Alisse Waterston is Presidential Scholar and Professor, City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and author or editor of seven books. A Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS) in the Programmes in Transnational Processes, Structural Violence, and Inequality (2020-2022), she served as President of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2015-17. In addition, Waterston serves as Editor of the book series, Intimate Ethnography (Berghahn Books) and Advisor for Otherwise Magazine. Her most recent article is “Imagining World Solidarities for a Livable Future,” kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology (2020). Charlotte Corden is an illustrator and fine artist whose work centers around what it is to be human. She is fascinated with how the power of hand-drawn images can reveal and describe complex truths. As anthropologist and illustrator she has worked with Stripe Partners, the British Cabinet Office, and the National Health Service, UK. As a fine artist, she has studied drawing and painting at the London Fine Art Studios and the Arts Student’s League in New York City. Join via Zoom Meeting ID: 839 1812 6364 / Passcode: 822601 |
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Monday, March 29, 2021 Bodies and clothing are in exchange and influence each other. Guyanese Hindus describe this interrelationship of clothing and bodies by highlighting that during acts of consuming clothing—when it is worn or gifted—substances and energies are transferred between bodies and dress, creating mutual touch. This touch is facilitated through for example body fluids, which transform used or ‘touched’ clothing into a person’s material likeness. Clothes and other material objects are thus dwelling structures for substances and energies, which have a special capacity to ‘take on’ former consumers. Used clothes are frequently exchanged within Guyanese Hindu families, a practice that remains relevant in the context of migration and is facilitated by the sending of ‘barrels.’ Gifts of used clothing become a means of recreating transnational families and religious communities. Additionally, gifts of clothing are not only relevant with regard to human social actors, but they furthermore materialize and visualize the relationships between people and deities, as clothes are frequently offered to deities during Hindu pujas (ritual veneration). In this talk I discuss the notions of touch and contact in the context of Guyanese transnational migration: I argue that in transnational networks, gifts of used clothing facilitate a means to literally stay in touch. Sinah Kloß holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Heidelberg University, Germany. Since February 2020 she is leader of the research group “Marking Power: Embodied Dependencies, Haptic Regimes and Body Modification” at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), University of Bonn, Germany. Her current research project discusses the sensory history of touch and body modification and the interrelation of permanence, tactility, religion and servitude in Hindu communities of Suriname, Trinidad and Guyana. Her most recent books include the edited volume “Tattoo Histories: Transcultural Perspectives on the Narratives, Practices, and Representations of Tattooing” (Routledge, 2020) and the monograph “Fabrics of Indianness: The Exchange and Consumption of Clothing in Transnational Guyanese Hindu Communities” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).Join via Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/82737596363?pwd=ZUpKOUNhYlpjQmwxNHFSS3llY2xkQT09 Meeting ID: 827 3759 6363 Passcode: 614305 |
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Tuesday, March 23, 2021 Environmental and infrastructural transformations in Turkey’s expansive swamps and marshes have unfolded against the backdrop of tightening authoritarian rule and the rise of wetland conservation. Drawing on fieldwork with farmers, scientists, and bureaucrats in two Turkish agrarian deltas, this talk explores how relationships between water, sediment, infrastructure, plants, and animals matter in contemporary Turkey, and what these relationships reveal about the intersection of moral and ecological concerns in the current moment. The “wetland” emerged as a globally significant scientific category over the course of the 20th century, becoming a key concept within Turkish state-making projects built on attempts to manipulate swampy nature. As transnational science and environmentalism cast the wetland in a starring role, Turkish farmers, scientists, and bureaucrats also drew on wetlands (sulakalanlar) as a novel idiom for claiming divergent ecological futures. I analyze these transformations between humans, non-humans, and their unstable surroundings in Turkey through the concept of moral ecologies—contrasting notions of just relations among people, land, water, infrastructure, animals, and plants. Divergent moral claims about ecology, infrastructure, and the livelihood of nonhuman animals have become central to a Turkish politics of livability. This approach to the wetlands of contemporary Turkey demonstrates how the valuation and governance of non-human creatures and elemental assemblages are not only entangled with human politics: they constitute it. Caterina Scaramelli is an anthropologist of the environment and science. After completing her PhD at MIT's History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society Program, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Humanistic Inquiry and in the Anthropology Department at Amherst College, and an Agrarian Studies postdoctoral associate at Yale. Currently, she is research assistant professor in the departments of Anthropology and of Earth and Environment at Boston University. Scaramelli's research addresses practices and politics of environmental expertise and the political ecology of conservation. Her fieldwork in Turkey has focused on the making and unmaking of watery places—rivers, wetlands, marshes, urban waters, and agricultural irrigation—and now she is studying the cultivation and contested meanings of "local" agricultural seeds. Her first book, How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey, was published in March 2021 with Stanford University Press. Join Zoom Meeting https://bard.zoom.us/j/88142814000?pwd=S2ZqRVZoQVVnMTFQekdwc3RWbG5zdz09 Meeting ID: 881 4281 4000 Passcode: 337474 |
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Saturday, February 20, 2021 The Caribbean Students Association invites the Bard community to join a virtual live screening and panel discussion of the newest Jamaican Dancehall documentary, Out There Without Fear, by Bard student Joelle Powe. This is a multidisciplinary cross-cultural experience expanding into gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, theater, film, anthropology, sociology, music, Africana studies, history, preservation, and religion through the study of dance. Day 1: Panel Discussion – February 19 from 1 pm to 3 pm EST Meet with the filmmaker and panelists calling in from Kingston, Jamaica. Musicologist Herbie Miller, iconic dancer Kool Kid, and internationally renowned choreographer Latonya Style want to answer your questions! The panel will be moderated by the documentarian, Joelle Powe. Day 2: Dance Workshop – February 20 from 3 pm to 4 pm EST Dance with two award-winning Dancehall celebrities, Kool Kid and Latonya Style. Join Zoom here: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86881698188?pwd=R1FSVEtIRndaRFNMY202bzlMQzl1dz09 Meeting ID: 868 8169 8188 Passcode: 178132 Art . . . Dance . . . Classism . . . Violence . . . Sexuality . . . Homophobia . . . The Church . . . The Empowerment of Women . . . Blackness |
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Friday, February 19, 2021 The Caribbean Students Association invites the Bard community to join a virtual live screening and panel discussion of the newest Jamaican Dancehall documentary, Out There Without Fear, by Bard student Joelle Powe. This is a multidisciplinary cross-cultural experience expanding into gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, theater, film, anthropology, sociology, music, Africana studies, history, preservation, and religion through the study of dance. Day 1: Panel Discussion – February 19 from 1 pm to 3 pm EST Meet with the filmmaker and panelists calling in from Kingston, Jamaica. Musicologist Herbie Miller, iconic dancer Kool Kid, and internationally renowned choreographer Latonya Style want to answer your questions! The panel will be moderated by the documentarian, Joelle Powe. Day 2: Dance Workshop – February 20 from 3 pm to 4 pm EST Dance with two award-winning Dancehall celebrities, Kool Kid and Latonya Style. Join Zoom here: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86881698188?pwd=R1FSVEtIRndaRFNMY202bzlMQzl1dz09 Meeting ID: 868 8169 8188 Passcode: 178132 Art . . . Dance . . . Classism . . . Violence . . . Sexuality . . . Homophobia . . . The Church . . . The Empowerment of Women . . . Blackness |