16 Novembre 2015 – Séminaire TES, Yasushi Uchiyamada
10 h30 Amphithéâtre Fabre, campus Victoire
La faculté d'anthropologie et le laboratoire ADESS proposent plusieurs séminaires Temps, espace, sociétés. Pratiques rituelles, mise en mémoire et processus identitaires (TES) tout au long de l'année universitaire.
Yasushi Uchiyamada interviendra pour 3 séminaires TES au 1er semestre sur le thème général "How to follow transforming beings – an anthropological reflection"
Le thème de la conférence du jour "A becoming Goddess: Neither hierarchy, nor gentrification, then what is it?"
In three research seminars I will present a processual/ becoming approach to make sense of the nature of (minor) beings in South India. This is an anthropological exercise of revisiting the familiar by shedding light on the unfamiliar in the familiar. It aims at discussing the works of the margin of indeterminacy.
In my first lecture, I will critique the explanatory capacity the Dumontian hierarchisation and that of the gentrification theory. I then present an alternative approach, which is not synthetic, but descriptive: I shall follow the processes wherein the minor deity transforms her mode of existence endlessly. In this end, I shall present an ethnographic case history of a goddess from Kerala. The goddess is a deified untouchable woman who died a tragic death. In her former life, she was a mistress of a Brahman priest. After her death, she was reified in the form of a stone in a forest, which developed into a shrine, and then into a guardian deity of Lord Shiva and her consort Parvati, and then into an independent nocturnal goddess. The Dumontian theorisation and the gentrification theory are incapable of explaining this transformation.
Main Text:
Uchiyamada, Yasushi (2008) Kurati and Kali: The dead-end of hierarchical finality and the moving body that assembles unthinkable series (un published conference paper)
