Papers by Prarthana Saikia
This volume invites the reader to join in with the recent focus on subjectivity and self-reflecti... more This volume invites the reader to join in with the recent focus on subjectivity and self-reflection, as the means of understanding and engaging with the social and historical changes in the world through storytelling. It examines the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction, on the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two fields co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and, on the other, by re-examining their political, aesthetic, and social relevance to world history. Following the intellectual crisis of the 1970s, anthropology has been criticized for losing its ethnographic authority and vocation. However, as a consequence of this, ethnographic scope has opened towards more subjective and self-reflexive forms of knowledge and representations, such as the crossing of the boundaries between autobiography and ethnography. The collection of essays re-introduces the importance of authorship in relationship to readership, making a ground-breaking move towards the study of fictiona...
Short abstract: This panel aims to take on the challenge of expanding the field of anthropology t... more Short abstract: This panel aims to take on the challenge of expanding the field of anthropology towards fictional novels and films, and the question to be raised is: if we accept ethnography as a semi-fictional genre, the ethnographer as an auteur, and the monograph as a chronotope, what can the anthropological thought gain by a turn towards fiction? Long abstract: In the past, the anthropology of art focused almost exclusively on collective works of traditional art, or on individual revisions of similar themes, traced back to the world of mythology and cosmology. In this sense, it distinguished between traditional (i.e. 'indigenous') works of art, from modern art, in terms of non-fiction and fiction respectively. Questions of authorship and modernity in anthropology challenged this distinction, highlighting a general affinity between ethnographic vision and fiction (Needham 1984, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Turner 1987, Clifford 1988, Deveraux and Hillman 1995, Barba 1995, Fo...
Seminar , 2023
Various claims to legal citizenship after 1947, introduced a significant turn in Assam’s politica... more Various claims to legal citizenship after 1947, introduced a significant turn in Assam’s political and social life. Citizenship became a site of extraction. The paper endeavours to examine how claiming citizenship evolves as a process of identifying “others” to systematically alienate, extract and eliminate and how in the process the various claims by the others become integral to the evolution of citizenship discourse.
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Papers by Prarthana Saikia