Reading, preparation of summary of main points and arguments, questions for further discussion to bring to class; followed by active discussion and participation

1. This paper is designed to consolidate your readings for the first 4 weeks and apply them to an ethnographic context. So use our readings from the first 4 weeks

    

   All of the readings below are accounts of Indian women in an extreme situation: where they are seen as ‘possessed’ by spirits. All are feminist accounts, but they are written at different periods of anthropological writing. How would you see shifts in terms of (i) how they evaluate possession as a form of victimhood for women? (ii) the extent to which they provide even possessed women with some agency in their ethnography (ii) the extent to which they bring in wider issues of inequality, not only class, but colonial legacies, when describing women’s agency, or lack of agency.

    

    

   Readings:

2. Said’s critique of anthropological representations; Mani and Abu-Lughod’s critique of representations of women exclusively as victims..

    

   Brown, P, M. Macintyre “A Daughter: A thing to be given away’. in Women in Society: Interdisciplinary Essays. Eds. Cambridge Womens Studies Collective, London: Virago Press. pp27-47

    

   Isabele Deces-Clarkes. 2000, ‘Of women and demons’ and ‘The decapitation of young brides’ (chs. 5 and 6) in Religion Against the Self. An ethnography of Tamil rituals. Oxford University Press.

    

   Kalpana Ram. 2012. ‘How is afflictive possession ‘learned’? Gender and motility in South India. Ethnos, Journal of Anthropology, 77 (2), pp 203-226.

This essay is designed to get you to discuss ‘resistance’ as a way of thinking about agency. What are the criticisms that have been levelled at too exclusive a reliance on resistance? What are the ethnographic strategies recommended by Ortner and Abu Lughod Essay as a way of re-locating and writing about resistance? (Remember all this when you come to writing your own ethnographies!!) How does the following ethnographies measure up to such recommendations? It is a wonderful ethnography and is available online at MQ library. It is a big book! Those who read the whole thing are blown away. I don’t expect you will be able to. So - be sure to at least read ch.10, and ch 5 on nervosa as both a bodily symptom and a form of registering power relations. But browse widely to get a sense of the way she situates women’s lives within very broad networks of power, class, poverty, client/patron relations.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes Death without Weeping.

1. The last essay is designed to test you on the concepts we cover in weeks 7-12 and the ethnographic reading for the course, especially last weeks. Since the last week does not entail new reading, get started as soon as we have our week 12 class Use the general discussion in week 13 to air any ideas and questions that come up while writing it.

    

   The concepts we have covered in this segment are: agency as tactics, agency as imitation, improvisation, making-do, as self-fashioning in taking on disciplines as an ethical endeavour.

   How do they help address the problems with liberal accounts of agency exclusively as individual freedom from external constraints imposed by culture, society, oppressive power? As exclusively a matter of formal consent?

   How does each enrich our understanding of agency?

   Of women’s lives especially where liberal norms don’t seem to be in evidence?

    

   I don’t want you to do any new reading as such, just use the ethnographic material we have covered: especially in last weeks, Mahmood on piety, Dalidowicz on dance pedagogy, Abu Lughod’s account of the Bedouin woman. Feel free to revisit ethnographies from earlier weeks as well.