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Society for Cultural Anthropology
Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology
Cosponsored - Retrospective - Oral Presentation Session
Bhrigupati Singh
Assistant Professor
Brown University
Vyjayanthi Rao
Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York
Bhrigupati Singh
Assistant Professor
Brown University
Veena Das
Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology
Johns Hopkins University
Bhrigupati Singh
Assistant Professor
Brown University
Lawrence Cohen
University of California, Berkeley
Vyjayanthi Rao
Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York
Akhil Gupta
University of California, Los Angeles
Pieter Van der Veer
Professor
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
Kamala Visweswaran
University of California, San Diego
Arjun Appadurai
Professor
New York University
Abstract: In this panel we seek to honor the systematically groundbreaking work of Arjun Appadurai, and the singular impact that his work has had on the discipline of anthropology. Rather than subsume Appadurai’s contribution under a single, influential rubric such as globalization or public culture, we hope to come closer to the particular shifts, surprises and memorable provocations that his work has had for scholars of different generations.
In drawing closer to his oeuvre we hope to ask new questions of it. How might we understand the movement from a South Indian temple to “modernity at large”? Has the world shifted further into the future, and if so in what ways does the past reappear? How did “public culture” shift and renew the seemingly overburdened and exhausted concept of culture? How might the Social Life of Things speak to current discussions of vitalism, animism and ontology? In what ways do questions of economy continually reappear in Appadurai’s work, both as concrete materiality and as fictive speculation? What place do the concepts of number and smallness and locality have in his work?
In this panel six scholars from different generations and genders to respond to Appadurai’s work and oeuvre. We ask our panelists to think aloud about the details, the forms and moments of effervescence, the questions, thoughts, phrases and formulations that have stayed with them from Appadurai’s work. Together, we seek to honor a continually inventive and groundbreaking adventure in anthropological thought.