Dalit Futures and Sexual Modernity in South India

त्रिभुवन विश्वविद्यालय, मानवशास्त्र केन्द्रीय विभाग र जस्ट फ्युचर्स पहलको संयुक्त आयोजनामा २०२५ जनवरी ६ का दिन 'दलित फ्युचर्स एण्ड सेक्सुअल मोडर्निटी इन साउथ इण्डिया' [Dalit Futures and Sexual Modernity in South India] विषयमा अमेरिकी मानवशास्त्री डा. लुशिंदा र्‍याम्बर्गको प्रवचन सहित सार्वजनिक बौद्धिक विमर्शको आयोजना गर्दैछौं । यहाँ प्रस्तुत छ, यस कार्यक्रमबारे छोटो जानकारी: 

Following the call of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, many Dalits have converted to Buddhism as a mode of political dissent and means of escape from the forms of social subjugation and stigmatization attached to “untouchability”. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research, I consider the sexual politics of this movement in relation to the temporality of stigma.  In particular, I investigate the widely held notion that women in particular find it difficult to break from ancestral religion through interviews with Buddhist women who continue to keep ancestral gods and ethnographic descriptions of weddings in which Buddhist and Hindu rituals are mixed. Drawing on conversations within feminist and queer theory about the distribution of social life and death through reproductive futurism as well as critiques of representations of native others as stuck in the past within postcolonial theory, I elaborate how Dalits work to elude the time set for them by others.

Short bio

Lucinda Ramberg is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Her research projects in South India have focused on the body as an artifact of culture and power in relation to questions of caste, sexuality, religiosity, and projects of social transformation.  Her first book, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded several prizes. Her current book project, We Were Always Buddhist: Dalit Conversion and Sexual Modernity, investigates the sexual politics of lived Buddhism through an ethnography of religious conversion in contemporary South India.