Kalpana Ram
Biographic Data
| ID | 85228 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kalpana Ram |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kalpana |
| FAMILY NAME | Ram |
| SIGNATURE | RAM K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3662-7908 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Imagining beyond a statist imaginary
The chilling infiltration by technologies of state power that make up modern governance is brought home by each of the articles in AE's "Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging" forum. In reflecting on them, I pose the question: Can we move beyond descriptions of human agency entirely within the cracks and fissures of state governance? Or can we develop a richer futural imagination that goes beyond a statist imaginary? If we are to sustain such…
Are Dalit Women Healers Allowed to Claim “Tradition”: The Phenomenology and Politics of Tradition in Rural Tamil Nadu
This essay uses Dalit women’s mediumship as a healing tradition that provides something of a “limit situation” from which to review basic assumptions about the varied ways in which we can understand what it is to “have” tradition—as an acquisition and inheritance that Dalit women enjoy like everyone else, but also as formal claims to value and recognition that are largely denied to Dalit women. Comparing Dalit women healers with male performers i…
Gender, Colonialism, and the Colonial Gaze
Colonial domination forged an intrinsic relationship with gender through modalities of sustained scrutiny and intervention. These dimensions are constitutive of a “gaze” that frequently found its object in women and their status. In postcolonial theory, the gaze has meant an unequally constituted right to scrutinize, to represent what is gazed at, and to intervene and alter the object of the gaze. This entry examines the contributions of Frantz F…
The Silences in Dominant Discourses
Subaltern Studies continues to be generative for understanding the present, provided we expand our evaluation beyond the question of ‘who is subaltern?'. This paper considers instead underlying methodological orientations that outlive their original empirical context, lending themselves to fresh applications. The original method trained us to notice gaps in governmental discourse, silences that underlie its claims to know and administer all withi…
Re-activating modern traditions of justice: Mobilising around health in rural Tamil Nadu, South India
This paper uses empirical material from health activists in Tamil Nadu to show that the health discourses that enjoy the greatest continuity and reach in India are also those that presume a radical connection between the health of the individual body and mobilising for a more just social order. The forging of this tradition is traced back to early anti-colonial forms of mobilisation. The transmission of this tradition is then ethnographically tra…
Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern
This book reflects on the way spirit possession unsettles some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. Drawing on spirit possession among women and the rich traditions of subaltern religion in Tamil Nadu, South India, the book concludes that the basis for constructing an alternative understanding of human agency need not rest on the usual requirements of a fully present consciousness or on the exercise of choice and planning. Instead of rel…
How is Afflictive Possession 'Learned'? Gender and Motility in South India
This paper examines forms of affliction that are understood as a kind of possession, all the more afflictive because they are experienced as 'coming out of nowhere'. It is easier to specify the kind of learning associated with valued forms of possession, which occur in the context of ritual performances that entail informal apprenticeships. The sense in which afflictive possession is 'learned' is far more diffuse, and occurs much earlier than the…
The swift currents of postcolonial theory: Difference and the challenges of engaging with popular religion in South India
Postcolonial theory has only partially enabled an engagement with subaltern popular religion. The Indian version, preoccupied with the dialectic between colonialism and nationalism, does not necessarily require engagement either with subalterns or with their practices in order to produce a seemingly self-sufficient account of modernity. A different set of problems is located with other influential models, such as Spivak's critique of ‘voice' as u…
Being 'rasikas: The affective pleasures of music and dance spectatorship and nationhood in Indian middle-class modernity
The long-standing dominance of history in the adjudication of debates on postcolonialism and modernity in India has resulted in the relegation of the knowledge claims of 'classical' performance traditions and aesthetic concepts to the domain of the essentializing and the untrustworthy. This paper argues that performances of music and dance have preserved an understanding of tradition that is more dynamic and agential than that put forward by nati…
Class and the clinic: The subject of medical pluralism and the transmission of inequality
This article, based on ethnographic work in rural Tamil Nadu, explores the relative invisibility of class and its characteristic modes of operation in the literature on medical pluralism in India. Using, as key concepts, habit, comfort, pre-familiarity and familiarization, the article suggests that we can shift the way we think of ‘pragmatism’, the term that is routinely used to describe subjects who follow pluralist strategies. In reconceptualiz…
Rural Midwives in South India: The Politics of Bodily Knowledge
Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu
In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treate…
I now have ar_ivu [knowledge] which dispels fears’: Instabilities in What it Means to ‘Know’ and the Effects of Tamil Political Party and Civil Society Intellectuals on Rural Women's Discourses
Religion, Gender and the Postcolonial Crisis of the Present: Reflections on and from India
The paper explores the crisis in modernity’s incapacity to address the Other in various overlapping domains, those of ‘religion’, ‘woman’, ‘tradition’ and ‘non-western societies’. It argues that this capacity, intrinsic to the very construction of modernity, has seriously weakened secular modern emancipatory projects not only in the west, but within countries like India. In India, projects strong among Indian intellectuals, such as feminism, secu…
Untimeliness as Moral Indictment: Tamil Agricultural Labouring Women's Use of Lament as Life Narrative
How do Dalit women forge certain forms of critical perspectives in relation to their existence? This paper explores the very particular poetics that shape the women's responses to an invitation by the ethnographer to tell her their life stories. Their narratives made use of several dominant discourses in south India that ritually construct a woman's life as a teleology of an unfolding essence, an embodied force that comes into flower and fruition…
Phantom Limbs: South Indian Dance and Immigrant Reifications of the Female Body
This paper explores the phenomenology of migration and gender, seeking to understand how it is that a certain construction of ‘Indianness’ and of womanhood finds one form of expression in the enrolment of middle-class girls in south Indian and other ‘classical’ dance schools. The paper argues that the immigrant situation recalls and opens up to be retrieved, an earlier history of nationalism. It does so, not in the form of intellectual recall, bu…
Dancing The Past Into Life: The Rasa, Nrtta and Rāga of Immigrant Existence
This paper attempts to explore the significant place that Indian ‘classical’ dance has held, both in postcolonial Indian nationalism, and in the middle‐class Indian diaspora's efforts to transmit the cultural past. While arguing that this orientation towards culture as a set of representations signals a fundamental breakdown in a more primary relation to the past, the paper turns to Indian dance and music for a language with which to appreciate b…
Listening to the Call of Dance: Re‐thinking Authenticity and ‘Essentialism’
A sustained and devastating critique has been aimed in recent years at a metaphysics of truth which understands truth and authenticity as essence, as fixed, self‐identical and persistent over time. So successful has this critique been that it is now possible to speak of authenticity only in terms of a certain ‘strategic’ or politically necessary engagement, on the part of subaltern groups, with an essentialist metaphysics. While the critique is a…
Listening to the Call of Dance: Re-thinking Authenticity and 'Essentialism
A sustained and devastating critique has been aimed in recent years at a metaphysics of truth which understands truth and authenticity as essence, as fixed, self-identical and persistent over time. So successful has this critique been that it is now possible to speak of authenticity only in terms of a certain ‘strategic’ or politically necessary engagement, on the part of subaltern groups, with an essentialist metaphysics. While the critique is a…
Dancing The Past Into Life: TheRasa, NrttaandRāgaof Immigrant Existence
This paper attempts to explore the significant place that Indian ‘classical’ dance has held, both in postcolonial Indian nationalism, and in the middle-class Indian diaspora's efforts to transmit the cultural past. While arguing that this orientation towards culture as a set of representations signals a fundamental breakdown in a more primary relation to the past, the paper turns to Indian dance and music for a language with which to appreciate b…
Maternity and the story of enlightenment in the colonies: Tamil coastal women, south India
On confronting a hysterectomy: Australia 1993 Gynaecologist 1: Of course, on the other hand, you may be emotionally attached to your uterus. Some women are ... Gynaecologist 2: Once a woman has had her children, the uterus is useless and often a downright nuisance. And I am not being sexist. ... The antinomies of the practical and the emotional, of the use value of our bodies and the psychic investment we place on it, continues to structure the w…
Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific
Feminist theories have focused on contemporary, Western, middle-class experiences of maternity. This 1998 volume brings other mothers, from Asia and the Pacific, into scholarly view, aiming to show that birthing and mothering can be a very different experience for women in other parts of the world. The contributors document a wide variety of conceptions of motherhood, and drawing on ethnographic and historical research, they explore the relations…
Na shariram nadhi, My body is mine
Rationalism, Cultural Nationalism and the Reform of Body Politics: Minority Intellectuals of the Tamil Catholic Community
Cet article s'inscrit dans un projet plus large qui entreprend l'examen des configurations locales de la modernite, telles qu 'elles apparaissent dans plusieurs types de discours intervenant dans le modelage de la subjectivite des basses castes du Tamil Nadu rural. L'interet porte par l'A. a la comprehension de la configuration changeante des formations discursives l'a amene a etudier le role pivot des intellectuels. Il explore les tensions prese…
Medical management and giving birth: Responses of coastal women in Tamil Nadu
This paper is an ethnographer’s attempt to present the experience of maternity among lowcaste Mukkuvar women of the coastal fishing belt of Kanyakumari district in Tamil Nadu in India and the women’s responses to modern medical ‘management’ of pregnancy and birth. It argues that women’s decisions whether or not to seek medical care during pregnancy, and where to give birth, are based on a finely tuned appreciation of the ways in which class and c…
Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern
This book reflects on the way spirit possession unsettles some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. Drawing on spirit possession among women and the rich traditions of subaltern religion in Tamil Nadu, South India, the book concludes that the basis for constructing an alternative understanding of human agency need not rest on the usual requirements of a fully present consciousness or on the exercise of choice and planning. Instead of rel…
Too 'traditional' once again: Some poststructuralists on the aspirations of the immigrant/third world female subject
1993). Too ‘traditional’ once again: Some poststructuralists on the aspirations of the immigrant/third world female subject. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 8, No. 17, pp. 5-28
Phantom Limbs: South Indian Dance and Immigrant Reifications of the Female Body
This paper explores the phenomenology of migration and gender, seeking to understand how it is that a certain construction of ‘Indianness’ and of womanhood finds one form of expression in the enrolment of middle-class girls in south Indian and other ‘classical’ dance schools. The paper argues that the immigrant situation recalls and opens up to be retrieved, an earlier history of nationalism. It does so, not in the form of intellectual recall, bu…
How is Afflictive Possession 'Learned'? Gender and Motility in South India
This paper examines forms of affliction that are understood as a kind of possession, all the more afflictive because they are experienced as 'coming out of nowhere'. It is easier to specify the kind of learning associated with valued forms of possession, which occur in the context of ritual performances that entail informal apprenticeships. The sense in which afflictive possession is 'learned' is far more diffuse, and occurs much earlier than the…
Rationalism, Cultural Nationalism and the Reform of Body Politics: Minority Intellectuals of the Tamil Catholic Community
Cet article s'inscrit dans un projet plus large qui entreprend l'examen des configurations locales de la modernite, telles qu 'elles apparaissent dans plusieurs types de discours intervenant dans le modelage de la subjectivite des basses castes du Tamil Nadu rural. L'interet porte par l'A. a la comprehension de la configuration changeante des formations discursives l'a amene a etudier le role pivot des intellectuels. Il explore les tensions prese…
Being 'rasikas: The affective pleasures of music and dance spectatorship and nationhood in Indian middle-class modernity
The long-standing dominance of history in the adjudication of debates on postcolonialism and modernity in India has resulted in the relegation of the knowledge claims of 'classical' performance traditions and aesthetic concepts to the domain of the essentializing and the untrustworthy. This paper argues that performances of music and dance have preserved an understanding of tradition that is more dynamic and agential than that put forward by nati…
Medical management and giving birth: Responses of coastal women in Tamil Nadu
This paper is an ethnographer’s attempt to present the experience of maternity among lowcaste Mukkuvar women of the coastal fishing belt of Kanyakumari district in Tamil Nadu in India and the women’s responses to modern medical ‘management’ of pregnancy and birth. It argues that women’s decisions whether or not to seek medical care during pregnancy, and where to give birth, are based on a finely tuned appreciation of the ways in which class and c…
First” and “third world” feminisms: A new perspective
(1991). “First” and “third world” feminisms: a new perspective? Asian Studies Review: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 91-96
Class and the clinic: The subject of medical pluralism and the transmission of inequality
This article, based on ethnographic work in rural Tamil Nadu, explores the relative invisibility of class and its characteristic modes of operation in the literature on medical pluralism in India. Using, as key concepts, habit, comfort, pre-familiarity and familiarization, the article suggests that we can shift the way we think of ‘pragmatism’, the term that is routinely used to describe subjects who follow pluralist strategies. In reconceptualiz…
Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu
In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treate…
Re-activating modern traditions of justice: Mobilising around health in rural Tamil Nadu, South India
This paper uses empirical material from health activists in Tamil Nadu to show that the health discourses that enjoy the greatest continuity and reach in India are also those that presume a radical connection between the health of the individual body and mobilising for a more just social order. The forging of this tradition is traced back to early anti-colonial forms of mobilisation. The transmission of this tradition is then ethnographically tra…
Na shariram nadhi, My body is mine
Imagining beyond a statist imaginary
The chilling infiltration by technologies of state power that make up modern governance is brought home by each of the articles in AE's "Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging" forum. In reflecting on them, I pose the question: Can we move beyond descriptions of human agency entirely within the cracks and fissures of state governance? Or can we develop a richer futural imagination that goes beyond a statist imaginary? If we are to sustain such…
I now have ar_ivu [knowledge] which dispels fears’: Instabilities in What it Means to ‘Know’ and the Effects of Tamil Political Party and Civil Society Intellectuals on Rural Women's Discourses
Books/Livres
Survey of Canadian Protestant Missionary Archives Relating to Africa
Although Canada has shared in the task of evangelization from the first decade of the nineteenth century and Canadian church missions have been laboring in Africa since the 1880s, they are, unlike their American and British counterparts, mostly unknown, Even scholarly studies on church missions like those of Groves, and Neil contain only occasional references to Canadian involvement in world missions, while many directories and almanacs on missio…
The Barren Relationship: Britain and Ethiopia, 1805-1868
First” and “third world” feminisms: A new perspective
(1991). “First” and “third world” feminisms: a new perspective? Asian Studies Review: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 91-96
Too 'traditional' once again: Some poststructuralists on the aspirations of the immigrant/third world female subject
1993). Too ‘traditional’ once again: Some poststructuralists on the aspirations of the immigrant/third world female subject. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 8, No. 17, pp. 5-28
Medical management and giving birth: Responses of coastal women in Tamil Nadu
This paper is an ethnographer’s attempt to present the experience of maternity among lowcaste Mukkuvar women of the coastal fishing belt of Kanyakumari district in Tamil Nadu in India and the women’s responses to modern medical ‘management’ of pregnancy and birth. It argues that women’s decisions whether or not to seek medical care during pregnancy, and where to give birth, are based on a finely tuned appreciation of the ways in which class and c…
Rationalism, Cultural Nationalism and the Reform of Body Politics: Minority Intellectuals of the Tamil Catholic Community
Cet article s'inscrit dans un projet plus large qui entreprend l'examen des configurations locales de la modernite, telles qu 'elles apparaissent dans plusieurs types de discours intervenant dans le modelage de la subjectivite des basses castes du Tamil Nadu rural. L'interet porte par l'A. a la comprehension de la configuration changeante des formations discursives l'a amene a etudier le role pivot des intellectuels. Il explore les tensions prese…
Maternity and the story of enlightenment in the colonies: Tamil coastal women, south India
On confronting a hysterectomy: Australia 1993 Gynaecologist 1: Of course, on the other hand, you may be emotionally attached to your uterus. Some women are ... Gynaecologist 2: Once a woman has had her children, the uterus is useless and often a downright nuisance. And I am not being sexist. ... The antinomies of the practical and the emotional, of the use value of our bodies and the psychic investment we place on it, continues to structure the w…
Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific
Feminist theories have focused on contemporary, Western, middle-class experiences of maternity. This 1998 volume brings other mothers, from Asia and the Pacific, into scholarly view, aiming to show that birthing and mothering can be a very different experience for women in other parts of the world. The contributors document a wide variety of conceptions of motherhood, and drawing on ethnographic and historical research, they explore the relations…
Na shariram nadhi, My body is mine
Dancing The Past Into Life: The Rasa, Nrtta and Rāga of Immigrant Existence
This paper attempts to explore the significant place that Indian ‘classical’ dance has held, both in postcolonial Indian nationalism, and in the middle‐class Indian diaspora's efforts to transmit the cultural past. While arguing that this orientation towards culture as a set of representations signals a fundamental breakdown in a more primary relation to the past, the paper turns to Indian dance and music for a language with which to appreciate b…
Listening to the Call of Dance: Re‐thinking Authenticity and ‘Essentialism’
A sustained and devastating critique has been aimed in recent years at a metaphysics of truth which understands truth and authenticity as essence, as fixed, self‐identical and persistent over time. So successful has this critique been that it is now possible to speak of authenticity only in terms of a certain ‘strategic’ or politically necessary engagement, on the part of subaltern groups, with an essentialist metaphysics. While the critique is a…
Listening to the Call of Dance: Re-thinking Authenticity and 'Essentialism
A sustained and devastating critique has been aimed in recent years at a metaphysics of truth which understands truth and authenticity as essence, as fixed, self-identical and persistent over time. So successful has this critique been that it is now possible to speak of authenticity only in terms of a certain ‘strategic’ or politically necessary engagement, on the part of subaltern groups, with an essentialist metaphysics. While the critique is a…
Dancing The Past Into Life: TheRasa, NrttaandRāgaof Immigrant Existence
This paper attempts to explore the significant place that Indian ‘classical’ dance has held, both in postcolonial Indian nationalism, and in the middle-class Indian diaspora's efforts to transmit the cultural past. While arguing that this orientation towards culture as a set of representations signals a fundamental breakdown in a more primary relation to the past, the paper turns to Indian dance and music for a language with which to appreciate b…
Phantom Limbs: South Indian Dance and Immigrant Reifications of the Female Body
This paper explores the phenomenology of migration and gender, seeking to understand how it is that a certain construction of ‘Indianness’ and of womanhood finds one form of expression in the enrolment of middle-class girls in south Indian and other ‘classical’ dance schools. The paper argues that the immigrant situation recalls and opens up to be retrieved, an earlier history of nationalism. It does so, not in the form of intellectual recall, bu…
Religion, Gender and the Postcolonial Crisis of the Present: Reflections on and from India
The paper explores the crisis in modernity’s incapacity to address the Other in various overlapping domains, those of ‘religion’, ‘woman’, ‘tradition’ and ‘non-western societies’. It argues that this capacity, intrinsic to the very construction of modernity, has seriously weakened secular modern emancipatory projects not only in the west, but within countries like India. In India, projects strong among Indian intellectuals, such as feminism, secu…
Untimeliness as Moral Indictment: Tamil Agricultural Labouring Women's Use of Lament as Life Narrative
How do Dalit women forge certain forms of critical perspectives in relation to their existence? This paper explores the very particular poetics that shape the women's responses to an invitation by the ethnographer to tell her their life stories. Their narratives made use of several dominant discourses in south India that ritually construct a woman's life as a teleology of an unfolding essence, an embodied force that comes into flower and fruition…
Rural Midwives in South India: The Politics of Bodily Knowledge
Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu
In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treate…
I now have ar_ivu [knowledge] which dispels fears’: Instabilities in What it Means to ‘Know’ and the Effects of Tamil Political Party and Civil Society Intellectuals on Rural Women's Discourses
Class and the clinic: The subject of medical pluralism and the transmission of inequality
This article, based on ethnographic work in rural Tamil Nadu, explores the relative invisibility of class and its characteristic modes of operation in the literature on medical pluralism in India. Using, as key concepts, habit, comfort, pre-familiarity and familiarization, the article suggests that we can shift the way we think of ‘pragmatism’, the term that is routinely used to describe subjects who follow pluralist strategies. In reconceptualiz…
The swift currents of postcolonial theory: Difference and the challenges of engaging with popular religion in South India
Postcolonial theory has only partially enabled an engagement with subaltern popular religion. The Indian version, preoccupied with the dialectic between colonialism and nationalism, does not necessarily require engagement either with subalterns or with their practices in order to produce a seemingly self-sufficient account of modernity. A different set of problems is located with other influential models, such as Spivak's critique of ‘voice' as u…
Being 'rasikas: The affective pleasures of music and dance spectatorship and nationhood in Indian middle-class modernity
The long-standing dominance of history in the adjudication of debates on postcolonialism and modernity in India has resulted in the relegation of the knowledge claims of 'classical' performance traditions and aesthetic concepts to the domain of the essentializing and the untrustworthy. This paper argues that performances of music and dance have preserved an understanding of tradition that is more dynamic and agential than that put forward by nati…
How is Afflictive Possession 'Learned'? Gender and Motility in South India
This paper examines forms of affliction that are understood as a kind of possession, all the more afflictive because they are experienced as 'coming out of nowhere'. It is easier to specify the kind of learning associated with valued forms of possession, which occur in the context of ritual performances that entail informal apprenticeships. The sense in which afflictive possession is 'learned' is far more diffuse, and occurs much earlier than the…
Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern
This book reflects on the way spirit possession unsettles some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. Drawing on spirit possession among women and the rich traditions of subaltern religion in Tamil Nadu, South India, the book concludes that the basis for constructing an alternative understanding of human agency need not rest on the usual requirements of a fully present consciousness or on the exercise of choice and planning. Instead of rel…
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (21 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Gender Studies (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Art (15 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (14 works) · Politics (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works)