Three-day conference: Friday, October 27 to Sunday, October 29.

South Asia is an empirical microcosm of the ecological and epistemological upending caused by climate change. Forming a quarter of the world's population and inhabiting tremendous cultural and geographic diversity, South Asia provides a unique case study for examining the challenges of climate change on diverse cultural forms. Climate change has indelibly altered landscapes and people, from Bangladeshi river deltas to Nepali mountaintops to Pakistani deserts to Indian megalopolises to Maldivian islands.

This conference thus asks: How is climate change rendered in visual arts, cinema, literature, and architecture in South Asia? How do projects of cultural expression render visibility to place-based narratives in South Asia? A humanistic approach to climate change entails developing modes of attention to a world yet to come. Centering the human imagination in the scientized field of climate change engenders a view of environmental variation over time that highlights the flexibility, resilience, and persistence of human life and its relation to the nonhuman worlds. Such a perspective links meaning and materiality, ingenuity, imagination, literature and livelihoods, subsistence, and stories.

The full conference schedule is now available.

Supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Central New York Humanities Corridor. Cosponsored by the Johnson Museum of Art and its Stoikov Asian Art Lecture Fund.

Sharif Hozoori, IIE-SRF fellow and visiting scholar at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies' South Asia Program will discuss his research about the failure of liberal democracy in Afghanistan due to the ruling elite's overt ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism has been present throughout Afghanistan's political history, but it peaked during President Ashraf Ghani's tenure after the establishment of a democratic regime in 2001. Ghani enacted policies that concentrated power around three individuals: himself, the national security advisor, and the Director General of the administrative office of the President, essentially creating a "Republic of Three Persons" or a "sinister triangle" in Afghanistan. These actions had a profoundly catastrophic effect on the evolution of democratic governance in the country.

About the Speaker

Sharif Hozoori holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Center for International Politics, Organization, and Disarmament in the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He was a professor of International Relations and taught both undergraduate and graduate students in Afghanistan before leaving the country after the Taliban takeover in August 2021. Currently, he is an IIE-SRF fellow and visiting scholar at the Einaudi Center's South Asia Program at Cornell University. His research areas are Afghanistan politics and foreign policy, identity politics, South Asia and Middle East politics, cultural studies, and conflict resolution and peace.

Host

Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Cosponsor

South Asia Program

Talk by Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard (English Language and Literature, University of Chicago)

“Is the ‘Coolie Woman’ A Banker?” revisits the figure of the “coolie woman” during Indian indenture in the British West Indies. Histories of indentured Indian women have focused on the experience of recruitment, labor exploitation, and especially violence at the hands of planters or would-be husbands. Instead, this talk looks instead to the bangles, necklaces, and anklets they carry in plain sight. Following brief but revealing references to jewelry through craft and financial histories, travel writing, poetry, photography, and painting, the “coolie woman” becomes an agent of global finance. Jewelry is a little-seen source of value, her collateral against the violence of the plantation and of companionate marriage.

Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, where she writes about the legacies of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean and in the broader Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Parsard is working on her first book project, “An Illicit Wage,” an aesthetic history of hustling, sex work, and hoarding as practices of freedom. Her scholarship has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies and can be found in American Quarterly, Small Axe, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and Representations.

To be a good woman? Caste, respectability and violence in South India and postwar Sri Lanka

This talk will focus on gendered lives in the midst of profound transformation. "It is hard to be a good woman", one of the older women I worked with in Kerala told me. She was an agricultural laborer from a Dalit community, and had latterly managed to achieve some form of stability from what had been an unhappy marriage. Like many of the older Dalit women i worked with, for her questions of caste, gender and negotiating with inheriting manual labor were fundamentally entangled with the ongoing realities of deep caste discrimination and also the context of working with one's relatives in the midst of neighborhoods for whom transforming the future were seen as major individual and collective duties. There is a long standing feminist discussion of the burdens and models of respectability that I draw from and challenge in discussing the specificities of how what women inherit and hope to transmit shapes their struggles. This was a question laid in earlier work in Sri Lanka around the challenges of moving beyond scholarly romanticisation of armed women to understand the struggles of ordinary minority Sri Lankan Tamil women when communities are focused on transformation that impose profound gendered costs and losses. I will thus briefly reflect upon the ongoing scholarly fascination with the armed militant which has signally overshadowed more critical analysis of women's lives in wartime and postwar Sri Lanka. This talk will span ethnographic work on Sri Lanka and India over two decades, and hopes to contribute to a larger feminist discussion of how we can sharpen our analysis of local struggles for transformation through centering gender, race and caste.

Sharika Thiranagama is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Sharika Thiranagama’s research has examined how political mobilization and domestic life intersect, focusing on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization. Her work on Sri Lanka explores changing forms of ethnicisation, the effects of protracted civil war on ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement and the transformations in and relationships between the political and the familial in the midst of political repression and militarization. Most recently, she has written on the effects of deep militarization in post-war Sri Lanka, the deification of the LTTE leader Prabhakaran among other works. She has also conducted research in Kerala, South India based in the Palakkad district, primarily on caste and with Dalit communities. She examines how communist-led political mobilization reconfigured older caste identities, re-entrenching caste inequities into new kinds of private neighborhood life. Her work focuses on the household as the prime site of the inheritance of work, stigma and servitude, as well as the possibility of inheritance, dignity, and social mobility.

The Bernd Lambert Memorial Lecture Series, inaugurated in 2017, was established by the Cornell University Department of Anthropology in honor of one of its distinguished emeriti, Bernd Lambert. A transnational refugee from the Holocaust and an ethnographer of the Pacific Islands, Lambert joined the Cornell faculty in 1964 and is remembered for his kind and generous presence. For over 50 years, his research and teaching ranged widely from issues of kinship, adoption, and social organization to myth and symbol. The Lambert lectures honor Prof. Lambert’s legacy by bringing similarly broad-minded scholars to the Cornell campus.

Co-sponsored by South Asia Program; History; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies; and the Society for the Humanities. Thank you.

Talk by Amrita Kurian (Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania)

This paper uses a historical and ethnographic approach to analyze how the ideal of the “progressive farmer” percolates into the literature and processes that help establish the latest standards in Indian Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) or cigarette tobacco markets. A legacy of colonial and postcolonial agricultural improvement projects, tobacco companies use the term as an accolade, indicating their preference for collaborating with some farmers over others - usually affluent farmers with the resources necessary to invest in improving farming practices. In a cash crop economy dominated by a few large buyers, these preferences also strongly influence the direction of state regulation and infrastructure projects. The paper argues that “progressive farming” practices geared toward producing standardized commodities reinforce the rural hegemony of affluent farmers while masking the infrastructural changes that have, over the years, shifted the financial burden of producing a quality crop from producers onto farmers. On the other hand, farmers, particularly affluent farmers, negotiate evolving metrics used to evaluate farming practices to variously align with the state and corporations and further their own goals of accumulating wealth and prestige.

Amrita Kurian is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. She has a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from UC San Diego and an M.Phil in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. Her ethnographic research is based in the Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) tobacco sector in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, where she studies experts’ scientific and affective mediation of markets and agrarian relations of production. Her articles titled “Flowers of Deception,” “Expert Disenchantment,” and “Progressive Farmers” are at various stages of review in Cultural Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Human Values, and Geoforum. Her essay “Accusations of Corruption: A Cautionary Tale from Indian Tobacco Auctions” was published in India in Transition and Scroll.in.