Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Center for Contemporary South Asia

Bhrigupati Singh - Conversations Between Anthropology and Philosophy

singh

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

12:00pm – 2:00pm

McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute

Light lunch provided. 

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," 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 theSouth locates the “south” as not merely a geographic category, but rather an epistemic one, as a generative source for theory and for understanding theworld as it is changing around us.  This year's program is aligned to the Sawyer Seminar on Displacement and Modernity, but 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 has published numerous articles on issues of religion, politics, media, and popular culture, in journals including Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Contributions to Indian Sociology. His recent book, titled Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Contemporary Rural India (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 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, entitled 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 Wittigenstein." For readings, please contact Vazira Zamindar at vfyz@brown.edu

Theory from the South