Middle East Studies

Theory from the South with Bhrigupati Singh

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

12:00pm – 2:00pm

McKinney Conference Room
Watson Institute

Open to the public 

MES Partner Event run by South Asian Studies

Theory from the South is a reading and discussion group, open to the public, that invites scholars from across campus that can "shake the ground" so to speak, to curate readings and lead conversations. 

The “global South” is a working category today for a diversity of intellectual projects centered on the non-European postcolonial world.  Theory from the South locates the “south” as notmerely a geographic category, but rather an epistemic one, as a generative source for theory and for understanding the world as it is changing around us.  This year's program is aligned to the MES Sawyer Seminar on Displacement and Modernitybut rather than focusing narrowly on “displacement,” it asks what conceptions of the “world,” the “global” in “global south,” are at work as we think mobility - crossing both territorial and disciplinary boundaries, or tracking people or ideas over time and space.

Bhrigupati Singh works on religion, politics, media, and popular culture, and is the author of Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Contemporary Rural India (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which was awarded the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. He is the co-editor of The Ground Between: Anthropological Engagements with Philosophy (Duke University Press, 2014), and serves as an associate editor of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 

In Theory from the South with Bhrigupati Singh, A Conversations Between Anthropology and Philosophy, we will be reading his essay "How concepts make the world look different," and an essay by Veena Das, "Anthropology and Wittgenstein." For readings, please contact Vazira Zamindar, Associate Professor of History, at vfyz@brown.edu

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