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Accepted Paper:

De-valued temporalities. Pregnant embodiment and female spirit mediumship, Dalit women in south India  
Kalpana Ram (Macquarie University)

Paper short abstract:

How do hierarchies of value de-value certain experiences of temporality? We will use the experiences of Dalit women who use spirit possession to re-negotiate the stigma of infertility to reflect on ways in which possession and mediumship might illuminate some features of pregnant embodiment.

Paper long abstract:

We all inhabit ‘time knots’, the term Chakrabarty employs to describe C.V Raman, Nobel Prize winning scientist from the 1930s, who took a ritual bath ahead of a solar eclipse. Chakrabarty would encourage us to similarly embrace the time knot and jettison the need to apply totalising principles such as rationalism and progress to every aspect of our existence. The example has particular salience for the global south where the title of ‘being modern’ places vast regions of the world in the temporal and ontological limbo of forever ‘being-developed’. But this scientist was able to comfortably respond to the question, saying “The Nobel prize? That was science, a solar eclipse is personal” (Provincialising Europe 2000:254). Such a comfort speaks of diverse and unequal sources of cultural capital within the so-called ‘developing world’. Brahman male scientists in the early twentieth century had both caste and gender advantages to draw on – a caste habitus as ‘traditional intellectuals’, in the Gramscian sense, supported by the invisible labour of lower castes as well as Brahman women to prepare their ritual bath and pure vegetarian, elaborate meals. These questions of labour, power and visibility are therefore, simultaneously, forms of value that hierarchise forms of bodily engagement with the world. This comes into clear contrast if we compare it with the temporalities of two forms of bodily engagement that struggle to receive recognition within the values of a patriarchal and caste/class order. Both possession and pregnancy strain at the limits of received discourses, whether of temporality, or indeed, of experience itself. Yet both are frequently interconnected in Tamil country (south India), as a diagnosis for the inability of a woman to successfully establish herself as the mother of children, whether due to spontaneous abortions, failure to conceive, or even when it takes the form of the death of children in early infancy. Possession makes a woman something other than a woman, and as such can offer some relief from the alternative in such circumstances– the stigma of being less than a woman. For yet other women, possession offers a potential pathway into cultivating this affliction into a form of mediumship where they become goddesses dispensing existential justice. The paper attends not only to the ethnographic specificities of these forms of negotiation, but to ways in which the rarer phenomenon of possession and mediumship could illuminate more widely shared features of temporality in pregnant embodiment.

Panel P15
Values of time, times of value
  Session 1 Monday 2 December, 2019, -