“ The Care and Feeding of Names: The Ritual Labor of Bejuni Priestesses and Cosmological Life in Autochthonous India”

Talk abstract:

Bejuni are female ritual specialists whose rites repair and regenerate ecological, social, and cosmological relationships crucial for life in the densely jungled Niyam Donger mountains of present-day Southern Odisha state in India. Often elderly and widowed, bejuni women play key roles in a cosmologically expansive process that recycles the dead back into life. During ethnographic research, I came to understand that bejuni labor is built around the ethical and material maintenance and repair of name-lines, capacious forms of personhood that move across conventional boundaries between lives and deaths and carry with them rights in swidden gardens and in persons. Their practices enact forms of social reproduction beyond sexual conjugality, situating personhood's temporalities outside biological regimes of life. Rupina, life cycle rites for name-lines, are managed by bejuni to create stability across the vagaries of life and death, and to reproduce togetherness and solidarity between living humans, ancestral kin, and spirit beings who abide throughout the landscape. Cosmological lifeworlds centered on female bejuni priestesses face displacement due to ecological demands accompanying regional mountaintop bauxite mining and its severe impacts on water supply and flow. This talk expands directions in black and indigenous feminist theory (Tuck 2009; Lorde 1984) and feminist anthropology of religion (Apffel-Marglin 1983; Mahmood 2004; Ramberg 2013) to elaborate the implications of bejuni praxis within a cosmological framework of social reproduction. Bejuni modes of cosmo-social reproduction offer a deeper reckoning of what is lost when mountains are torn down for capitalist natural resource extraction, raising critical questions about what counts as environmental justice and who are its intended beneficiaries.

Scholar Bio:

I am a sociocultural anthropologist and ethnographic fieldworker, having recently completed my Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at Cornell University (Dec ’23). As a social scientist, I am interested in forging connections between complex global issues and locally situated experiences to render macro-level issues comprehensible in human-scale terms. My research sheds light on the shrouded social and ecological implications of the green energy economy by closely examining how communities in mountainous eastern India, affected by multinational corporate aluminum mining, endeavor to regenerate their social and ecological environments amidst climate change. I am interested in drawing upon ethnographic data and multi-species, ontological, and indigenous feminist analytic frameworks to ask: 1) what counts as environmental justice and for what types of lives and bodies; and 2) how do conventional distinctions between religion and secularism unevenly distribute the impacts of climate change, often concentrating the ecological effects of elite global consumerism within autochthonous communities at the peripheries of world economies. Based on long-term immersive ethnographic research conducted in Odia and Kui/Kubi languages and supported by Fulbright-Hays, my dissertation research explores the intricate material economies and multifaceted social and environmental displacements that Jharnia (“Dongria Kondho”) interlocutors experience to accompany regional natural resource development. Entitled “Keepers of Water: Religion, Ecology, and Ethics as Materiality along a Green Energy Frontier in Tribal Odisha, India,” my dissertation is set amidst India’s geologically ancient Eastern Ghats mountains, along the rapidly expanding aluminum-bauxite natural resource frontier. There, mountainous landscapes revered by Jharnia indigenous interlocutors as their originary ancestor, a sovereign deity, and a living landscape are also coveted by mining companies for the potential natural resource wealth hidden beneath their jungled surfaces in the form of bauxite. Bauxite ore is strip-mined, refined into alumina powder, and then smelted into lightweight, strong, and flexible aluminum metals to feed the global proliferation of aluminum-dependent electric vehicles, fuel cells, military drones, inter-stellar reusable rockets, and recyclable soda-pop cans. Amidst unprecedented ecological challenges characterized by droughts, flooding, and the persistent impacts of metallic dust and water pollution, my dissertation, supported by a grant from the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, utilizes indigenous Jharnia water management practices to demonstrate that Jharnia social life, colonial categories of knowledge about religion, and the materialities of natural resources are intricately interconnected and entangled along the bauxite frontier in indigenous India.

"In September 2018, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, sister of Rushan Abbas, was abducted by Chinese authorities shortly after Rushan's speech condemning the Uyghur genocide. The documentary "In Search of My Sister" chronicles Rushan's relentless pursuit of truth and justice, spanning multiple countries. The film also exposes the CCP's harrowing crimes against humanity through the personal story of Rushan and other Uyghurs in the diaspora. "In Search of My Sister" has been screened worldwide, shedding light on these atrocities."

This screening is followed by a Q&A Session with Rushan Abbas.

About the Speaker

Rushan Abbas’s activism started in the mid-1980s as a student at Xinjiang University, co-organizing pro-democracy demonstrations in Urumchi in 1985 and 1988. Since her arrival in the United States in 1989, Ms. Abbas has been an ardent campaigner for the human rights of the Uyghur people. Ms. Abbas is the founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) and became one of the most prominent Uyghur voices in international activism for Uyghurs following her sister’s detainment by the Chinese government in 2018. Ms. Abbas has spearheaded numerous campaigns, including the “One Voice One Step” movement, which culminated in a simultaneous demonstration in 14 countries and 18 cities on March 15, 2018, to protest China’s detention of millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps.

Ms. Abbas frequently briefs global lawmakers and officials on the Uyghur genocide and provides testimonies at legislative bodies worldwide, such as the U.S. Congress, and other parliaments. She advocates for raising awareness and engaging in discussions on policy options to address the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party and halt the ongoing Uyghur genocide. She also serves as the Chairperson for the Advisory Board of the Axel Springer Freedom Foundation and as a board member of the Task Force on Human Trafficking within the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum.

In 2019, Ms. Abbas received the Freedom Fighter Award, and her work was recognized at the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2020. Under her leadership, CFU published the 'Genocide in East Turkistan' report in July 2020, leading to the organization receiving the World Democracy Courage Tribute in 2021 and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2022.

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Host
Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-Host
Cornell Cinema

Film screening and Q&A with Shaunak Sen (Director)

In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers — Nadeem and Saud — devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that has been falling from the sky at alarming rates. Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the ‘kite brothers’ spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift avian basement hospital. Director Shaunak Sen (Cities of Sleep and All that Breathes) explores the connection between the kites and the brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence. All That Breathes was nominated for Best Documentary Feature Academy Award in 2023.

Shaunak Sen is a filmmaker and film scholar based in New Delhi, India. Cities of Sleep (2016), his first feature-length documentary, was shown at various major international film festivals (including DOK Leipzig, DMZ Docs, and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, among others) and won 6 international awards. Shaunak received the IDFA Bertha Fund (2019), the Sundance Documentary Grant (2019), the Catapult Film Fund (2020), the Charles Wallace Grant, the Sarai CSDS Digital Media fellowship (2014), and the Films Division of India fellowship (2013). He was also a visiting scholar at Cambridge University (2018) and has published academic articles in Bioscope, Widescreen, and other journals.

The Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) gives students multiple ways to engage with Southeast Asia. Affiliate with our program to be informed of all SEAP events and activities. Undergraduates who minor in Southeast Asian Studies are advised by SEAP Program Faculty advisors who collaborate with them to construct a course of study based upon their area of interest. SEAP also runs the CU in Cambodia program for students interested in international travel.

Can’t attend? Contact seap@cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

This conference brings together scholars undertaking new research on questions of democratic resistance and sources of resilience in response to global evidence of democratic backsliding.

We will work together to analyze domestic and international factors, including institutions, civil society, political parties, voters, media, and foreign policy. In an era marked by threats to democracy from within nominally democratic institutions, by elected officials, and with varying degrees of support from the voting public, we seek to understand the interactive nature of democratic threats and resistance strategies.

As democracy can be conceived of as a continued contestation over rights, responsibilities, and rules, we aim to use this critical historical moment of contestation to expand our comparative conceptions of democratic practice, strategies of endurance and deepening or weakening of democratic regimes, and the social, economic, technological, and institutional factors that contribute to varied outcomes worldwide.

Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the conference is part of Einaudi's work on democratic threats and resilience.

Register to attend the conference

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March 22 Panels

Panel 1: Concepts and Measurement: Democracy 2.0
This panel will push beyond the measurement debates to address conceptual and ontological questions about how to measure democracy, and definitional questions at the heart of democracy’s weaknesses and promise in contemporary practice. Does the practice of a minimal definition of democracy contribute to public disenchantment, and is such practice durable?

Panel 2: Resilience Factors, Resistance Strategies, and Opposition Tactics
This panel will examine the social and economic bases of democratic resiliency, as well as various strategies, actors, and institutions that can fortify and even enhance democratic practice.

Panel 3: Stabilizing Forces? Historical Patterns and Contemporary Challenges
This panel will dissect the factors that have historically stabilized advanced industrial democracies—including party systems, modes of political representation, and patterns of capitalist development-- and their potential applicability to contemporary patterns of democratic backsliding and resistance.

March 23 Panel

Panel 4: International Actors and Regional Organizations
This panel will explore the ways in which authoritarian or democratic leaders and regimes exert influence on the regime types of other countries and the influence of regional organizations on participating countries’ regime trajectories.

Film screening with Sahraa Karimi (Director), followed by Q&A and conversation moderated by Iftikhar Dadi, John H. Burris Professor of History of Art

The desire for freedom is basic to human nature all over the world. Obtaining a driver's license is becoming a key factor towards attaining personal freedom for Afghan women. However, is the Afghan society prepared for women behind the wheel? In Afghan Women Behind the Wheel, director Sahraa Karimi, born and raised in Kabul, follows several Afghan women trying to obtain a driving license. Through personal interviews, Karimi discovers the motivations and desires of these women, which are often shaped by their age, social status, and family backgrounds. She taps into their lives and dreams and discusses religion and family traditions with them to better understand their journey toward their personal freedom.

Sahraa Karimi is an independent film director and screenwriter from Afghanistan. On August 15, 2021, she was forced to leave Afghanistan due to the sudden and unexpected fall of Kabul and the return of the Taliban to power. Currently, she is a Visiting Professor at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematographia (Rome National Film School) in Rome, Italy.

She belongs to the second generation of Afghan migrants in Iran. When she was 17 years old, she immigrated to the Slovak Republic. In August 2012, she returned to Kabul and established her own Film Production Company, Kapila Multimedia House, to support Afghan independent filmmakers and artists. Karimi received her PhD In Cinema (Fiction Film Directing & Screenwriting) from the Academy of Music and Performing Arts, Film and TV Faculty in Bratislava, Slovakia (FTF-VSMU).

Presented in collaboration with the Ithaca City of Asylum. Cosponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the Department of Performing & Media Arts, and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Financial support is provided by a Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Tickets are free, and can be reserved beforehand through Cornell Cinema.

Are you interested in the intersection of mental health and culture, global health, and community engagement? Do you want to gain field research skills and learn about indigenous communities in South India’s beautiful and fragile Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve? If so, the Cornell-Keystone Nilgiris Field Learning Program might be for you!

Learn about Cornell's new Global Grand Challenge: The Future and how you can propose a research or curricular project.

Global Cornell is opening what will be The Future’s only call for proposals. Interdisciplinary teams of faculty and researchers from all Cornell colleges, schools, and departments are encouraged to identify a research issue of global importance and plan a path to a successful alternative future.

Teams may apply for research project support up to $150,000 per year for two years. Stand-alone curricular projects are eligible for up to $20,000 per year for two years.

Deadline for letters of intent to apply (1 page): February 26, 2024Deadline for full proposals (5–7 pages): May 6, 2024Register here to join the virtual info session. The session will include an opportunity to ask questions and network with others interested in finding collaborators.

The information session slides and Q&A will be posted online after the event.