Home>News and Events

Title: Intimacy as Failure: Social Science and the Predicament of Feeling

Where & When:  March 18, 2008
                           341 Eggers Hall
                           12.30 pm

Type of Activity: Speaker

Speaking: Laurah Klepinger-Mathew

Summary:This talk is a presentation of pre-dissertation research undertaken in May, 2007, with the support of a Bharati Memorial Summer Research Grant. Based on two weeks participant-observation and interviewing at a small Yoga center and International Yoga Ashram in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, this presentation addresses the complicated situation of transnational anthropological practice and the dilemma of intimate relationships in ethnographic enquiry. While recent writing on globalization and public culture has destabilized the notion of culture as a place-based object of anthropological investigation, research agendas and formal proposals often require a framing of fieldwork as a journey to a circumscribable place to accomplish explicit goals. In the case of this research, personal commitments and emotional ties inhibited the productive progress of the pre-framed research agenda in the space of personal tragedy, while the details of participant-observation sat squarely in the space of the larger project: how to practice feminist anthropology of the production of globalized Yoga. This talk proposes an intimate ethnography of feeling as insight into the workings of power in the transnational production of Yoga and "tradition."

 Sponsorship: The South Asia Center

---