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Accepted Paper:

A Shaheed Minar in Lisbon: national imaginaries, objects and the transnational person  
José Mapril (Center for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Paper short abstract:

This paper relates the agency of objects, the distributed person and the transnational experience. Through an ethnography of the construction of a replica of the Shaheed Minar in central Lisbon, the argument is that this sculpture remakes nationalist imaginaries and social ties, at home and abroad.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing inspiration on the works of Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour, this paper will reveal the relation between the agency of material objects - namely their capacity to act and shape the contexts surrounding them - the distributed person and the transnational experience. These themes will be empirically explored through an ethnography of the (occasional) construction of a small replica of the Shaheed Minar - the martyrs memorial located in Dhaka University - in a central square in downtown Lisbon. The main argument is that this sculpture not only reproduces the aesthetics of a specific nationalist imaginary about the desh but simultaneously enables the making of ties between persons, present and past, at home and abroad.

Panel P35
Imagining Bangladesh and its 40 years
  Session 1