SASC Colloquium Series: Wonder: Ritual Creativity and Modern Life in South Asia, Tulasi Srinivas

Event time: 
Thursday, October 25, 2018 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
Henry R. Luce Hall (LUCE ), 202 See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

In this talk, Srinivas explores a wonderful world where deities jump fences and priests ride in helicopters to present a joyful, imaginative, yet critical reading of modern religious life. Drawing on nearly two decades of fieldwork with priests, residents, and devotees, and her own experience of living in the high-tech city of Bangalore, Srinivas discusses how ritual enmeshes with global modernity to create wonder—a feeling of amazement at being overcome by the unexpected and sublime. Offering a nuanced account of how the ruptures of modernity can be made normal, enrapturing, and even comical in a city swept up in globalization’s tumult, Srinivas brings the visceral richness of wonder—apparent in a creative ritual in and around Hindu temples—into the anthropological gaze. Broaching provocative philosophical themes like desire, complicity, loss, time, money, technology, and the imagination, Srinivas pursues an interrogation of wonder while reshaping our appreciation of wonder’s transformative potential for scholarship and for life.

Tulasi Srinivas, Emerson College

203-432-9345