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Abstract: This lecture traces the entanglements of kinship and religion by reflecting about diaspora Tamil women’s lives in the global city of Singapore. It makes an intervention in the studies of diasporic and urban religiosity by emphasizing the subjective and embodied experiences of devotion, sorcery, and divine possessions. The scholarship on Hinduism in Singapore has surfaced contestations and negotiations of plural identities in the multicultural city-state, amidst ongoing shifts in urban landscapes and policy directives. The gendered dimensions of everyday religious practices and rituals foregrounded in this lecture draws our attention away from the conflation of the ‘urban’ with ‘public spheres’, migrant adaptation and ‘transnational networks’ to the ways that the urban is inflected in intimate lives. The talk will narrate women’s life stories drawn from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017-2019 and offer possibilities of theorizing diasporic urban religiosity through women’s intimate and embodied experiences.
Speaker Biography: Dr. Ranjana Raghunathan is an Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Design Studies at Vidyashilp University, Bangalore. Her research interests are in Anthropology of Kinship & Relatedness, Phenomenology of Religion, Everyday Life, and Urban Ethnography. She received her PhD in 2020 from the National University of Singapore (NUS), where she also taught undergraduate courses. Ranjana has conducted ethnographic field research in Singapore and Mumbai, where she explored issues of home/belonging, intimacies, religion, and marginalization. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Her doctoral thesis won the Ground-breaking Subject Matter Accolade at the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize 2021 and the Best PhD Dissertation in South Asian Studies award in NUS for 2020.
At Vidyashilp University, Ranjana has setup and leads its Ethnography Lab, an initiative to facilitate conversations on ethnographic research and writing among academics, students and stakeholders in the wider community. She is currently a Primary Investigator on an urban ethnography project about Bangalore.
ALL ARE WELCOME
[For more info, contact: Dr Aleena Sebastian, aleena.sebastian@nias.res.in]