CSAS Lecture Series | Ghosts of Scandals Past: Inter-Caste Relationships and the Question of the Village in Himalayan India

Please note: This lecture will be held in person and virtually on Zoom. The webinar is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Once you've registered, joining information will be sent to your email. Register for the Zoom webinar at: https://myumi.ch/W64N7. Note, this lecture will not be recorded and published at a later date.

This talk explores how the political economy of sexuality is at the heart of the question of the village in South Asia. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian Himalaya to examine how specters of caste violence (literally) haunt the present in ways that disrupt idealized theories of the village as a distinct social formation.

Radhika Govindrajan is an associate professor of anthropology and international studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 and Penguin India in 2019.