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Paper short abstract

This performance-led paper stages toilets as ethnographic counter-sites where caste, shame, and filth are produced and contested. Through parody and embodied storytelling, it rethinks anthropology beyond clean panels and colonial habits of knowledge.

Paper long abstract

We come to this panel from toilets, saunas, steam rooms, and other spaces where bodies are made to feel excessive, polluting, and out of place. These sites sit at the borders of respectability. In the Indian context, 'Ganda' (dirty, filthy) is never neutral. It is a caste-coded judgement that travels through architecture, surveillance, and the management of desire. Toilets become places where shame is learned quickly and carried quietly.

This contribution refuses to clean these encounters into a conventional conference paper. Instead, we propose a series of small performances that treat toilets as ethnographic and theatrical counter-sites to the conference panel itself. Against the colonial architecture of the panel (upright, distant, orderly), the toilet insists on proximity, vulnerability, and bodily presence. It demands a different way of knowing.

Drawing on anecdotal moments from the field such as fear after surveillance, laughter after parody, bodies mimicking moral outrage until it collapses into camp; this work uses gesture, exaggeration, and silence as ethnographic methods. Shame is not resolved or redeemed. It is replayed, stretched, and made strange. 'Ganda' becomes method rather than metaphor.

By staging anthropology through toilets, borders, and shame, this performance asks how theatre can help us stay with the affective intensities of caste, sexuality, and surveillance instead of writing them away. It invites participants to rethink ethnography as an embodied, collective practice, and to imagine what anthropology might become when knowledge is allowed to get dirty.