April 10th 2023:
“Spectral Connections: Peopling Artifacts and Belongings in Museum Collections”
by Dr. Sowparnika Balaswaminathan
Sowparnika Balaswaminathan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, and was a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC.
Her work concerns the politics of heritage, the ethics and aesthetics of artisanal labor, and religious art traditions in India. Her ethnographic project, currently being written as a manuscript, examines the formulation of artisanal personhood in contemporary India at the nexus of politicized and neoliberalized Hindu art, and evolving politics of caste, specifically amongst the Tamil Vishwakarma community in Swamimalai, Tamilnadu. Her postdoctoral project explored the affective labor of museum collecting during the Cold war era, and the limits of ethnonational representation in museum exhibits of the Asian ethnographic collections at the Smithsonian NMNH.
AGIC 