26.04.2023

Workshop: "Resources and the Construction of Forms of Wellbeing while negotiating the Relationship between the Individual and the Social"

Workshop des Teilprojekts C 06, 08.Mai - 10.Mai 2023

Participants:

1. Ms. Vishnupriya R.Y. (Pondichery University)
2. Mr. Gokul Sreekumar (Pondichery University)
3. Mr. Mohammed Rafi (Pondichery University)
4. Dr. Thanuja Mummidi (Pondichery University)
5. Dr. Zoé Headley (EHESS-Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Centre d'Etudes sur l'Inde et sur l'Asie du Sud (CEIAS)
6. Dr. Inayat Ali (Department of Public Health & Allied Sciences (DPH&AS), Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan)
7. Dr. Natalie Lang (Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen)
8. Jun Prof. Carola Lorea (University of Tübingen)
9. Mr. Thambi Durai Thangavel (University of Tübingen)
10. Ms. Franca Webel (University of Tübingen)
11. Prof. Gabriele Alex (University of Tübingen)

Öffentlich:

Key Note: A Sensuous Pandemic: Relationships of Contagion across South Asian Ritual Communities

ABSTRACT
Global hegemonic narratives of the Covid pandemic and biomedical protocols are accompanied by myriads of situated interpretations of disease and of salvation.
This paper will discuss narratives of immunity that are deeply embedded in the social and religious context of a displaced Dalit community. Members of this Bengali Dalit community believe that the Coronavirus can affect only the upper caste and high-class layers of society, those who sit in air-conditioned offices and live in the big cities. Practitioners successfully prevent the viral spread through a sonic vaccine – the collective practice of kīrtan – and a kind of power (śakti) accumulated through sweat and physical labor.
I will accompany my remote ethnography with case-studies from various South Asian communities, drawing upon a collaborative international project, CoronAsur: Religions and Covid-19 (https://ari.nus.edu.sg/coronasur-home/). These cases show the creativity and the endeavour of community members that have strived to reproduce proximity and togetherness despite the governmental requirements to maintain physical distance, devising innovative ways to stay “in touch” and to share powerful substances. While public health mandates have been thought as provoking sensory deprivation and touch starvation, I call for attention to the embodied and sensuous dimensions of lived pandemic experiences.
The delicate mediation between proximity and distance is analyzed through the lenses of sensory scholarship on religion. By attending to the stickiness of the ritual body sensorium, and particularly by recognizing modalities of mediation through touch and sound, perspectives from South Asia can help us expand the often-dichotomized notion of individual choice versus social responsibility. They suggest that pandemicity –  a relationship of contagion that affects/infects humans, non-humans and other-than-human beings – unveils notions of collective responsibility and aspirations for health that include wider cosmological dimensions, encompassing individual subjectivities and their porous skinscapes.
BIO-NOTE
Carola Lorea is currently a Jun. Professor of ‘Rethinking Global Religion’ at the University of Tübingen, after four years at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She is interested in religion and society, and studies how oral traditions, songs and popular religious movements navigate across and beyond South Asian borders. Her scholarship is driven by social justice, epistemic disobedience, and knowledge decolonization. She received fellowships from the International Institute of Asian Studies, the Gonda Foundation, DAAD and the JNU Centre for Advanced Studies.

Closing Note: Vaccination “suicide” or “Western plot”: The (geo-) politics of vaccination in Pakistan

ABSTRACT
Vaccination in Pakistan has become a contested phenomenon. There have been rumors and conspiracy theories that it is a “Western” plot to sterilize Muslim women. Yet in 2011, these narratives became a "reality" when the American CIA administered a “fake” vaccine drive in Pakistan to locate Osama-bin-Laden. This “vaccination suicide” contributed to pre-existing narratives, and even resulted in violent attacks on vaccination teams. Situating my talk within various “critical events,” I unpack and analyze the complex interplay among sociocultural, economic, and (geo)-political factors that demonstrate contestation between local and global scales.
BIO-Note
Dr. Inayat Ali is Incharge Department of Public Health and Allied Sciences and Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan. He also serves as Research Fellow the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria. His current book is Contesting Measles and Vaccination in Pakistan: Cultural Beliefs, Structured Vulnerabilities, Mistrust, and Geo-Politics. Routledge: London (in press).