A Talk on ‘“I’ve Heard I’m Characterless”: On Women’s Digital Talk-Back in Village India’
About the Talk
This talk explores how young women in the mountain villages of Uttarakhand use social media to create forms of alibied speech that allow them to talk back to structures of power in the village. Drawing on ethnographic research, it tracks how digital media production has come to organize the village in ways that fundamentally shape social and political relations.
About the Speaker
Dr Govindrajan is a cultural anthropologist who works across the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of religion, South Asian Studies, and political anthropology. Her research is motivated by a longstanding interest in understanding how human relationships with nonhumans in South Asia are variously drawn into and shape broader issues of cultural, political, and social relevance. Her first book Animal Intimacies was an ethnography of multispecies relatedness in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India. It explores how this relatedness is shaped by wider issues and contexts, including colonialism, rural-urban migration, changing religious practices, right-wing nationalism, wildlife conservation, and the politics of gender. Dr Govindrajan is currently working on three research projects. The first draws on ethnographic and archival work in Uttarakhand to explore how democratic politics in contemporary India is being constituted anew through emergent discourses and practices of more-than-human sociality, relationality and responsibility. The second examines scandals around sex, love, religion and land in Uttarakhand in order to understand the changing nature of rural subjectivity in India. The third is concerned with the relationship between elections and broader social life, and examines how electoral discourses and practices and ordinary forms of sociality shape each other in rural and small-town Uttarakhand.