The 8th Social Change Annual Lecture

The Female Voice: Reinstituting Life
 

Speaker: Prof. Veena Das, distinguished anthropologist and Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Chair: K.N. Shrivastava, Director, IIC  

This lecture argues for a renewed understanding of the project of anthropology and the anthropological tone in philosophy not through the super concepts of the knowing subject, but through an acknowledgement of the vulnerability of life and the constant work of reinhabitation and reinstitution it requires. The speaker’s claim is that the blind spot in classical theories of society lies in the exclusion of the work done by women in reinstituting life, through a contempt for the ordinary and the quotidian repetitions within which women find and nourish improvisations, newness, and expression. The constitution of the subject as the male subject, and the sexualization of language itself, marks the texture of abstract theorizing in the social sciences. Against this vision of theory, the speaker offers the work of women writers in the vernacular, with Krishna Sobti as an exemplar who demonstrates a method and theory through a female voice honed from the streets and born in the domestic, addressing the violence seeded in everyday life. The constant work of repair women undertake treats life not as an object external to the subject but as that within which the subject evolves, through a transfiguration revealed in attention to detail.

(Collaboration: Council for Social Development and Sage India)