UCSB Anthropology Brown Bag Lecture Series Presents:

Public Memory and Spatial Practice in Urban India

By Dr. Mary Hancock

Abstract: My presentation will be an informal exploration of public memory in urban India, as it relates to the broader issues of the reconfiguration of urban space under late capitalism. Preliminary fieldwork in Madras City (Aug - Dec 1996) revealed that there have been recent shifts in the practices and sites of public memory. For example, on one of the major feeder roads into Madras, a new, "living history" museum, celebrating regional artisanry, has just opened; elsewhere in the city, new and longstanding public ritual spaces (temples, mosques, churches) anchor emerging and contested geographies of religious identity and nationalism. In my talk, I will describe new sites of public memory and the new ensembles of discourse and practice that produce and sustain them--pointing to ways that they are both enabled and challenged by contentious nationalisms, by India's policies of economic liberalization and by globalizing capitalism. This is very much a work-in-progress in which I will be emphasizing the questions that the fieldwork generated and the types of further research that I am contemplating.



Wednesday May 7, 1997
HSSB 2001A, The Anthropology Conference Room

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