About the Talk
Hinged on an artist community called Behrupiya, impersonation artists found across the region of South Asia, this talk shall aim at unravelling the intricacies of the key words, such as identity, religion, and community. While the discursive deliberations in various texts offer definite definitional understanding about these key words, the life and work of the folk artists under discussion shall provide stimulants for novel reasoning. For, Behrupiya embody fluid nature of religiosity due to their socio-religious orientation as well as the performative art, it is exceedingly difficult to uphold the categorical cognition of identity! The talk shall persuade us to seek for a newfound alliance of text and context in understanding the keywords!
About the Speaker
Dr Dev Nath Pathak is an Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi. He researches and writes on performative expressions and cultural politics in South Asia, and some of his monographs are In Defence of the Ordinary: Everyday Awakenings (2021) and Living and Dying: Meanings in Maithili Folklore (2018), in addition to several edited books and research articles in reputed national and international journals and fellowships at various institutions of eminence. Some of his edited books include Another South Asia (2018), Performative Communication: Culture and Politics in South Asia (2017), Investigating Developmentalism: Notions of Development in the Social Spheres(2019), Seeing South Asia: Visuals Beyond Borders (2021), and Neighbourhood and Neighborliness in Urban South Asia (2022). Currently, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Society and Culture in South Asia (published by Sage).