Video: Ethical Scholarship: Gender, Religion, & Difference—Women's Studies in Religion Panel 2022

Full transcript:

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Ethical Scholarship-- Gender, Religion, and Difference Women's Studies in Religion Panel, August 24, 2022.

ANN D. BRAUDE: They gave me the go-ahead to start, so we're going to start. I'm so delighted to see you. My name is Ann Braude. I'm the director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program and a faculty member here at the Divinity School, and I've been waiting for you for three years for the in-person audience.

[APPLAUSE]

So it's really great to have you here. And I am really proud and thrilled to be able to introduce this year's group of visiting research associates in the Women's Studies and Religion Program. This is the 50th year of our program. And this is the 50th group of scholars that we have brought to the school to push the boundaries of religious studies.

And we started this project 50 years ago. When I say we, it was really you because the Women's Studies and Religion Program is the result of student activism in the 1970s. And it remains a program that includes student representatives on our search committee every year in the selection process.

We conduct an international search every year to bring the five scholars who we think are doing the most to push forward the boundaries of religious studies in the arena of gender. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce today's group and give you a chance to hear from them.

Now, as you probably know, each scholar who is visiting us this year will be teaching a course, half of them in the fall and half in the spring. These are one-off courses. It's an opportunity to learn from a scholar about the new research area that they are exploring, and these courses will never be offered again. So it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Should I introduce all of you? Yes, I should introduce. OK. Thank you, Kinitra. I'm going to go in alphabetical order and I'll introduce each of them. And then we'll have a panel discussion to allow them to introduce their research projects to you so that you will be the first ones at Harvard to hear about the new research that they're bringing to the field of religious studies.

Just one more thing I'm going to do before I introduce this group. Do you all have this piece of paper? This has all of their names and research projects on one side. On the other side, it has all of the 200 or so scholars who have participated in the Women's Studies and Religion Program over the last 50 years.

And you will see there the names of many scholars whose work you read as undergrads or in other venues or whose work you will be reading during your time at the Divinity School. The scholars you're going to meet today are working on the books that you will be assigning some day in your classes. And that's why it's so exciting to have this up-front view of up-and-coming scholarship.

So they're not sitting in alphabetical order, but I'm going to introduce them in alphabetical order. But their names are there, so you can see them. Professor Kinitra Brooks in the middle is visiting with us from Michigan State University, where she is associate professor and the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in literary studies in the Department of English.

She is well known for her work on Black women and genre fiction, particularly in the arena of horror. She's also well known for the Lemonade Reader, a collection of essays on Beyonce's 2016 audio-visual project. This year, she's going to be working on her project entitled Divine Conjurers-- Recovering Black Women's Intellectual Histories of Spirit Work.

She's going to be teaching-- you're teaching in the spring term? Yes. You're going to have to wait till spring to take a course on conjure feminism, which she'll be offering in the spring.

Second, let me introduce Professor Elyan Hill down at the end, who's visiting with us from Southern Methodist University, where she is an assistant professor of African and African Diaspora art history. She studies the embodied renderings of the domestic and transatlantic slave trades in Ghana, Togo, Benin, Liberia, and their diasporas.

She is going to be teaching also in the spring a course entitled Dancing Diaspora-- Black Feminist Art and Practice. Her research project is entitled Spirited Choreographies-- Women's Ritual, Identity, and History-Making in Ewe Performance.

Professor Jordan Katz, where-- there is Jordan, is visiting with us from the University of Massachusetts, where she is assistant professor of Judaic Studies. She's a historian of early modern European Jewry with a focus on Jewish cultural history of medicine and women and gender in the 17th and 18th centuries.

She is teaching this fall, a course on Jewish and Christian childbirth in early modern Europe. And her project is entitled Delivering Knowledge-- Midwives and the Making of Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe.

The next is Xhercis Mendez. Where's-- there's Xhercis. She is associate professor and vice chair of Women and Gender Studies at California State University in Fullerton. She focuses her research on race, gender, sex, and sexuality at the intersections of science and religion.

And she's teaching this fall, a course entitled When the Orishas Troubled Gender-- Decolonial and Non-binary Feminist Thought. Her research project is called Conjuring Another Humanity-- Decolonizing Feminist Methodologies Within Afro-Latinx Ritual.

Next, we have Rahina Muazu. Rahina. She is a scholar of Islam and formerly a research associate at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin. She received her doctorate in Islamic studies from the Freie Universitat Berlin, and her master's in Muslim culture studies from the Aga Khan University in London after beginning her education at the University of Jos in her native Nigeria.

She is teaching this fall a really innovative course on Quran recitation, theory, and practice. And her research project is entitled The Female Voice in the Quran and Quran Commentary.

Tulasi. Excuse me. Tulasi Srinivas is visiting with us from far away Emerson College across the river, where she is a professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Transnational Studies at the Marlborough Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. She is also a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and of the Indian Sociological Society.

She has published six books, including most recently one I'm sure you've seen on your syllabi, The Cow in the Elevator-- An Anthropology of Wonder. She will be teaching in the spring term, a course on the Goddess Gender, Sexuality, and Sacred Ecology in South Asia. And her research project is The Runaway Goddess-- Water, Gender, and Caste in the Climate Apocalypse.

So let me now ask the research associates to tell you a bit about their work. And I'm going to return to the alphabetical order, if I may, and start with Professor Brooks.

Kanitra, you were among a small group of scholars that coined the term "conjure feminism" as the topic for a special issue of last fall's journal Hypatia-- A Journal of Feminist Philosophy as well as of your upcoming course. What happens when you bring the words conjure and feminism together, and why did you think it was important to do so?

What made you think it could be possible to trace a genealogy of conjure feminism from the religious thought of a 17th-century Congolese woman to 21st-century fantasy fiction? In less than five minutes, please.

KINITRA D. BROOKS: Less than five minutes.

[LAUGHTER]

KINITRA D. BROOKS: So conjure feminism came about because one, the practice and traditions of the women of my family. So I was born and raised in New Orleans and my great-grandmother was a countrywoman and she actually healed some fevers that I had as a little girl. And I also knew that she deeply identified as a Christian woman. OK. Do you want me to do my voice? I can do the voice.

[LAUGHTER]

OK. As a Christian woman and as a child of the Lord, I know that womanist theology is very much structured within the Black Protestant practice. I thought that we needed terms that included those extra Christian practices that our grandmothers would do, that our aunts would be whispered about in our families, but also provided a spiritual grounding for Black women, particularly in the US South because I wanted to ground it and give it a regionality as well.

One, not just because I'm a Southerner. I also think so much of the Black South is overlooked as a place of intellectual prowess and intellectuality in itself. So to say that it wasn't just us learning to cook from our grandmothers, it was also about us learning how herbs worked. It was also about us learning how we could actually create and change reality by using the tools of our ancestors. So I wanted to bring these ideas together.

And I also wanted to have this continued conversation with Raboutou and Herskovitz and coming throughout of just how Christian is the Black Christian practice, specifically in terms of using conjure because conjure existed before the Black church. And it remains a part of the Black church, it just isn't spoken about as openly or acknowledged.

So to have those sometimes uncomfortable conversations about where our Christianity begins and the blendings that happens in our practices as they are. I'm going through my notes. In terms of bringing in Dona Kimpa Vita, she was burned as a heretic in 1706 in the Kongo Kingdom. And she was an elite, a member of the Congo aristocracy. She was literate.

She was a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic. She believed that Jesus was Black and that she was possessed by the spirit of Saint Anthony. And she was also a [NON-ENGLISH] which meant that she practices what is commonly known today as [NON-ENGLISH].

So she was doing traditional indigenous African religious practices along with her Christianity and bringing this and tracing this intellectual political heretical history to the women of the US South and eventually to the women of fantasy writers such as NK Jemisin, who writes about a conjure woman who used conjure as part of the civil rights movement.

We know that the civil rights movement focused a lot on Christianity. There's also this narrative of the secularity of the Black Power movement. But we also know that traditional African religious practices were moving all throughout those political movements.

So a lot of this is investigating this intertwined nature between Black women's spiritual realities as well as their political motivation moving together. And looking at how conjuring as magic practices of the Black South, how it has roots in the African continent and how those practices have been continued. Is that five minutes?

ANN D. BRAUDE: I don't know but it was perfect.

[LAUGHTER]

Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

If people really stick to time, we're going to have time for a few questions at the end. I don't know if that will happen. If it doesn't, at least you can have names and faces put together so that you can approach our visiting faculty during the year and address your questions to them either over lunch or in their classes.

Elyan. Professor Hill, your book project, Spirited Choreographies, focuses on Ewe women in the coastal regions of Ghana and Togo who use ritual performances to transmit histories of migration and enslavement to young people. What attracted you to studying dance as a source for understanding cultural production of West African women? That's my first question.

My second question is that as American academics we are so familiar with the genre of the slave narrative. What intellectual shifts are required in your work to relocate women's narratives to the African continent where enslavement rather than slavery or escape from slavery forms the pivot point of the story?

ELYAN JEANINE HILL: Thank you for these questions. I hope you all can hear me. I really like to think of my work as being about African art in motion. And part of what that allows me to do is to bring together lots of different, not only disciplines but also ways of thinking about devotional practices, ways of thinking about history-making, ways of thinking about what counts as art, what counts as history.

And one of the important elements of that is thinking about dance in a more serious way as a form of history-making. So the work that I do with Ewe women involves apprenticeship that I apprentice with elderly women who are teaching young women about not only their culture but about very specific, very complex histories that they don't like to talk about.

So a lot of what happens in this transmission of knowledge about histories of domestic West African slavery, which would be coastal West Africans, who purchased Northern West Africans who were enslaved on the coast, mostly women, who are then incorporated into their families in lots of different ways.

But with a history like that, so this is usually between 1700s into the 1850s, so you have these histories that people don't want to talk about because they are taboo in a lot of ways but that they're transmitting to young women. And for me, what was important was to think about why don't we know more about these histories. And part of the reason for that is that we focus so much on text.

And even when I tell people I look at dance and visual histories, they'll say, why don't just do an oral history? Even oral histories have a different purpose than a dance history or a visual history. So I can't remember which scholar it is who talks about this, but she talks about the fact that a written history is about the event itself. An oral history is about the interpretation of that event.

But to me I would say that a dance and a visual history, that's about the relationship, sometimes even specialized relationships between different players. So between the people who are involved, whether it is past and present because I'm working with groups that are still speaking to their ancestors. And so for me, dance was a way for me to get around this focus on often colonial languages.

So many of the women that I work with, they don't speak French or English, which are the national languages of Ghana and Togo. They don't write in Ewe, they speak Ewe, and they perform. So these women still have histories.

And these histories are still essential to understanding the slave trade holistically, not just understanding the transatlantic slave trade, not just understanding African American voices and diasporic voices but also how do those connect to the regional diasporas that are within West Africa, the complexities between different groups of people.

So for me, dance was my way of being able to step into these spaces of women's leadership and allow them to lead and teach me instead of saying, oh, well, you're not writing in this way, you're not producing histories in a way that academia has accepted, so I'm not going to count them. So for me, that was why dance was so important.

And in thinking about African art in motion, I look at beaded regalia. That is a part of the performances that the women do, that is a part of festival performance, which are considered to be secular, but sacred secular in West Africa is mostly just a myth.

[LAUGHTER]

And then you have ritual practices which are more private. And so you have altar building, which are these tables that are like these waterfalls of color with all of these different offerings for spirits. And one thing that I start to think about is the fact that many of the objects that are on an altar will also end up on people's bodies during performances.

So whether it's, as I said the beaded regalia or even specific figures that are meant to represent ancestors, even jewelry. Certain pieces of jewelry will represent specific people or specific types of spirits. And these will be danced, and so then the body is transformed in these moments into a type of altar. So I think about that as well.

And when and asks about how are we thinking about a slave narrative, for example, in this context in a very different way than we would think of it say in the US, for me, one of the big differences is we don't have the comfort that many of us go to of easy binaries. So this is the enslaving person, this is the enslaved person, because the people that I work with, that I speak to, they're descended from both. And, I mean, many of us in this country are also descended from both.

So it doesn't allow us to say this person did this and this person did that, that we have to work within those tensions and understand what those stories mean within those tensions. And what does it mean to have histories that are not fixed, that it's not written down and done, that it is continuing each time you perform it, to have a new meaning, to have a new way of moving that the spirits return to talk again?

I don't know if that's my five minutes, but you can ask me more questions. But that is the essence of the work that I do is trying to understand histories in a new way, trying to bring together disciplines like dance studies and art history. So we can talk about devotional practices materially, so we can talk about gender in ways that really are not fixed, ways that depend on which ancestor are you talking to now.

ANN D. BRAUDE: Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

Next, I'm going to turn to Jordan Katz. Jordan, I absolutely love the title of your book in progress, Delivering Knowledge-- Midwives and the Making of Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe. It made me think about my own experience of how vividly when you bear a child you can remember the words and actions of those who assisted with the delivery throughout your life.

What made you want to study Jewish midwives and how do you think your findings might add to the shape of the field of Jewish studies which has not looked at midwives? Can you introduce us to one or two of the midwives who figure in your book? And why did they become midwives and how might their experience have differed from that of their non-Jewish counterparts?

JORDAN R. KATZ: Yeah. So firstly, I just want to say it's so interesting to hear the other RAs, the other research associates talk about their projects because it's making me think about how much overlap there is in some of the themes even with we're working with different geographies and temporalities. So that's really interesting.

I came to this project in sort of-- I feel like it was a roundabout way, although maybe we all feel that way all the time about our projects.

[LAUGHTER]

I was really interested in the Jewish community in a specific context of early modern Western Europe, what are some of the mechanics that make it tick, the institutions. And I was also interested from a different angle in medical history. Once upon a time, I thought I was going to go to medical school, and so maybe this was my way of exercising that piece of my brain by doing medical history instead.

And so I started looking into texts written by physicians, by Jewish physicians, and I came across again and again references to female Jewish experts. So female Jewish medical practitioners. And then I really started looking into rabbinic sources. So correspondences, letters written back and forth between rabbinic colleagues with Jewish legal questions about what to do in a specific case.

And I started noticing a trend that often in cases that have to do with matters of purity, a corpus of Jewish law that has to do with ritual purity when the question center around a woman's body, many of these questions seem to be referred through some kind of female medical expert. And sometimes those women are referred to as midwives, sometimes they are called wise women.

This is interesting. The conjure women, this kind of overlap. Wise women or cunning women is often the term that's used in the English language scholarship about them. And so I started realizing in my training as a Jewish historian that this kind of story of women's medical roles as a way of seeing a female agency in Jewish communities in this period is something that had not been looked at at all.

And it's one of those things that once you're attuned to it, you start to see it really everywhere. Like many fields, Jewish studies and Jewish history was largely for many, many years dominated by male scholars who often prioritized the rabbinic correspondences and texts that I actually was looking at but they were really interested in the writers of these texts, the male figures, what's going on in terms of rabbinic law.

I'm less interested in the legal outcomes of these and more in terms of what they can tell us about who was in the discourse, who was part of this system of a republic of letters if you will, a rabbinic republic of letters. And so that's the avenue through which I came to this project.

But then I started looking into communally-held manuscripts because so many Jewish communities, almost every single one in Europe, kept a or many records registers of the day-to-day occurrences in the life of their community. And you start to find midwives mentioned, their salaries, specific instances that occurred, their roles in testifying about the paternity of an infant.

And so to me, it became a way to tell a different story about early modern European Jews, my subjects of inquiry, that has been told before and one that really centers women to tell us something different about what was going on in this context and how a medical lens can offer an alternative story.

So in terms of the second question, one of the midwives who's very near and dear to my heart having now worked on her for, I would say, I don't know, seven years plugging away at her texts, is a woman named Rachel or Rachel Solomons. And Rachel Solomons became a midwife in Amsterdam in 1709.

And what's so interesting about her is that there are many Jewish midwives who came to the medical college in Amsterdam to officially register themselves, become licensed, go through apprenticeship-- calling back to Elyan's project as well. Apprenticeship was the common path towards becoming a midwife. But how do we know more about Rachel Solomons?

We actually have a manuscript that she wrote in and that the cover page, the title page, it contains a translation of a text that was translated from Dutch into Yiddish. So just going back to Ann's question about what was the experience or how were Jewish midwives' roles or training path different, the reason that Rachael Solomons had this translation of a midwifery treatise rendered into Yiddish from Dutch is because she could not read Dutch.

And she could not read the city regulations in Dutch, and so she had to have them-- she commissioned a translation of these regulations and of this midwifery treatise so that she could participate in these larger networks of medical culture that was surrounding her in Amsterdam and in Europe more widely. And this was often the case with Jewish midwives who were part of the larger medical establishment.

In some ways, they went to go register, pay their fees, get licensed, but they stood apart in other ways. So whether linguistically or whether because they were employed by the community and not by the larger city municipal government. And so just to stick with Amsterdam as an example, there are really good records about Jewish midwives who were employed by the Jewish community in Amsterdam.

And that community, one of the things that was distinct about Jews in this context is that they developed really their own system for managing medical care. And so they divided midwives into different quarters that they were responsible for. But this also mirrored what the city was doing with its Christian midwives, which was also dividing them into different quarters that they were responsible for.

So I hope that this project my wish for it is that it throws into focus not only what a different story of the Jewish community but of Jewish communal relations with their surrounding municipal and bureaucratic structures, what are Jews pulling from the outside, what are they resisting, and how can we provide a more textured narrative of what that interaction might have looked like in this period.

ANN D. BRAUDE: All right. Thank you so much, Jordan.

[APPLAUSE]

Next, I'm going to turn to Xherxis. Xhercis, your book on Afro-Cuban Santeria uses a close reading of ritual practice to trouble assumptions about what constitutes humanity, gender, sex, bodies, power, and religion. Why is it important to look at academic approaches to the study of gender and religion from the perspective of Santeria? What can we learn by doing so?

And if you have time, you don't have to go there, but I'm so curious about the way that your work utilizes one of the most influential and widely read books that has come out of this program, the Women's Studies and Religion Program, and that's Karen McCarthy Brown's landmark 1991 text, Mama Lola, a text which students and colleagues may be familiar with.

And I can't resist telling you this story that when Karen McCarthy Brown was here, there was a fire in her home and the manuscript burned. And she was kept in the WSRP a second year so she could rewrite the manuscript.

[LAUGHTER]

And I'm really grateful that that happened. That was long before my time. But I wonder what has changed in the 30 years since Mama Lola was published that has enabled you to ask questions of the field of religious studies that could not be conceived of in 1991?

XHERCIS MENDEZ: Thank you so much for those questions. Thank you for hanging out with us.

[LAUGHTER]

I actually am going to start there because I actually went to a program at Binghamton University that no longer exists. And it was a philosophy program that allowed us to approach philosophy from a non-Western perspective. There was at that time this turn to really thinking about what are decolonial approaches to scholarship.

So we were interested in this question of not just decolonization but what they were referring to at the time as decoloniality. We started with this idea that coloniality lives beyond the end of formal colonialism. It lives in books, it lives in all of our approaches, it lives in the air we breathe. So what does it mean to take a step back and not begin from a colonial lens?

So here I am in this program and thinking, like, where does this precolonial/decolonial thing live? And I think it takes me back to what you were saying earlier about, we don't have archives. If you come from the Caribbean, if you come from groups of people that were formerly colonized, your materials won't necessarily live in an archive. So you have to start thinking very creatively and expansively about where you're going to look.

And even if it is the case that what you inherit are practices that have been touched by colonialism, which many of these practices have been, one of the things that I was interested in is in seeing if there were ingredients that managed to resist the colonial project. So I started thinking about access points that I had, access points that were familiar to me.

I'm a dancer. I'm a salsa dancer, so I started asking this question, talk about roundabout ways.

[LAUGHTER]

Are there ways that you can imbibe other understandings of gender and sexuality through music and dance? That's where I started. And then I started thinking about the music that I grew up with. I mean, I was telling the story earlier, I grew up, my mom every Sunday would play what we call orisha music. These rhythms and these patterns, this music that was calling to the orishas as we cleaned the house.

I was taken to Santeria as a child for healing and I have vivid embodied memories of those ritual experiences. And so I started looking at these [SPANISH] who also happened to be [SPANISH], like really famous salsa singers, like Hector Lavoe or La Lupe or Celia Cruz, which we were having it later.

[LAUGHTER]

But what's interesting about that is even if they were not formally initiated into the practices, they were conjuring these orishas in spaces that were not considered sacred spaces by Western standards.

And so going back to this art, this point about how do these practices trouble all kinds of binaries, the sacred and the secular, as well as binaries and assumptions we make about how to read space, how to read bodies, and how to read power in real-time.

So I was really interested in this thing that we were doing-- and I'm in women gender studies, right? So we're doing these gender analyses that presuppose that carry with them a lot of eurocentric assumptions about how communities organize power, who's left out of authority, deference.

And in Santeria spaces, you will find a lot of women who wield an enormous amount of power. Not just women, I'm talking about Black women. Women who if we come in with assumptions about who's at the bottom of the hierarchy, we're going to miss something.

So then the project really became about our ethical responsibility as researchers to really do our work to understand a cosmology from within it to then take a step back and say, what are we looking for when we do the gender analysis? And I'll give you a concrete example so you can see what I'm talking about.

So for example, there's this wonderful book called The Invention of Women by Oreyonke Oyewumi, and one of the arguments in the book is that seniority is an organizing principle. She's talking about Nigeria. There is connections that have been made by Santeria practitioners to Nigeria explicitly. So I was interested in thinking about seniority in and of itself. Seniority as an organizing power system is more egalitarian than patriarchy.

[LAUGHTER]

A patriarchal arrangement, because everyone's going to get old.

[LAUGHTER]

Right? So we all stand a chance.

[LAUGHTER]

It's not that there's no hierarchy but that everyone gets a shot. So if you think about how Santeria operates, there's an organizing system that is spiritual seniority, that isn't necessarily tied to actual age, visible age, something that you could read or see just by looking at the people in the space. And that forces you as a researcher to really take a step back and think, wait, how is power being constituted in this space at this time?

All that to say that when she makes this argument in the book that researchers have gone to the space and have seen older men married to younger women and have made arguments about patriarchal arrangements-- this is patriarchal, but the question is, how do we know where seniority ends and where patriarchy begins? And while we tell the narrative of patriarchy, we are making invisible the possibility of seniority.

So I'm interested in looking at systems of power that coexist but are not necessarily that visible to researchers who haven't done the work to find out a little bit more about the local modes of empowerment. So that's one example. There's many, many more that have to do with bodies, with altars, with possession, all types of practices that actually introduce non-binary, non-gendered ways of being in the world and that are completely operative.

We don't have to make them up. They're not pie in the sky. We don't have to write a manifesto for them. They are there and they can be activated and operationalized at any given moment. So I'm going to leave it there. Thank you.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

ANN D. BRAUDE: Thanks so much. Next, I'd like to turn to Rahina Muazu. Rahina, your project on whether women's public recitation of the Quran is prohibited by Islamic law concerns a practice that you yourself engage in and teach as a religious practice in addition to as the subject of your academic work.

How do you think your work on the interpretation of Quranic texts is affected by the fact that you are a practitioner as well as a scholar of Quranic recitation? Do the two roles enhance each other? Do they ever conflict?

One of the challenges of your project has been to translate the Arabic word [ARABIC] for an English-speaking audience. Can you help us understand why this has been so challenging and how the term differs from the standard translation of nakedness as Americans understand the term? Rahina.

RAHINA MUAZU: Thank you and thank you all again. So I would like to start, I mean, I will try to stay within time. I want to start briefly by explaining my-- it doesn't work? OK. Oh, it's better now. Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

So thank you Ann for the questions. So I study female voices in the Quran, and I analyze Quran interpretations what is called [ARABIC]. I also analyze [ARABIC], that legal opinions, jurisprudential positions of Muslim jurists and theologians. And my main question is to find out the position of the female voice on the Islamic law, a way that women's voices are categorized on the [ARABIC] which I sometimes translate as nudity or nakedness.

And by that, the understanding of female voices as part of their nakedness means that the female voices must be taken out of the public space. The jurists that understand the voices to be part of their nakedness, they asked women to cover. And covering the voices means women shouldn't talk or shouldn't think or shouldn't recite the Quran in public spaces. So that's the focus of my work or I would say that's one aspect.

It also has an ethnographic side. We are in addition to looking at or analyzing the jurists' positions, I also study the implications of those positions on women's lives and the society in general. How for instance, women are sometimes able to empower themselves to build capital when they are allowed to use their voices in public spaces.

And to do that, I employ the theory of the forms of capital developed by a French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. And I see how women could gain for instance economic capital, symbolic, social, how they will become rich through public usage of their voices, especially in Quran recitation.

So going back to Ann's question on my positionality and how it affects being a practitioner. I recite the Quran. And I also study the Quran and also the voices, women's voices as I have said. So it's challenging. I mean, I was trained in a madrasa in northern Nigeria and I study different Islamic sciences. I was also trained there in Quran recitation.

And the questions I'm taught to act there differ from what I act now. I would say the whole epistemology of knowledge is different. What is knowing, what does it mean to know, how we know is seen differently. I will sometimes discuss my research with former madrasa classmates and they will not count it as proper knowledge.

So that's challenging. But I think more often than not, I find my two roles or I'll say two trainings more complementing each other. For instance, I said something briefly about the course I'll be teaching this semester. I hope to see some of you there. So it's an experimental course where I want to bring my training in the madrasa to study the production of religious sound, particularly the sound of the Quran.

So we'll do that through line in some of the recitation rules. That's in the first part of the course. And then in the second part, we take a step back and then we analyze that through the lens of gender in an interdisciplinary way by drawing literature from anthropology, religious studies, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and so on.

And with regards to the interpretation of [ARABIC], so [ARABIC] is one of the main themes of my research. It's an Arabic term. It's pronounced [ARABIC] with a deep-- I don't know what to call it. You have to feel it here. Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

So sometimes it's even translated as private parts, blemish, genitalia, something like that. And in pre-Islamic period, the Arabs used to refer to houses that don't have protective fences as [ARABIC]. And in the Quran, it's been used differently, ranging from spaces of vulnerability to times of privacy.

And under Islamic law, [ARABIC] is usually used to refer to body parts of not only women but also men and children and former slaves. So it refers to those parts that shouldn't be exposed, shouldn't be seen by someone else.

So as I translate it now, sometimes I started with nudity and then I shifted to nakedness. But then the issue is nakedness as one of the scholars, [INAUDIBLE] recently pointed out to me who is also working in [ARABIC]. So nakedness is the fact of being uncovered. I'm not a native English speaker, but I understand nakedness as being uncovered. And [ARABIC] is something that's supposed to be covered or protected from view, whether it's covered or not.

So for instance, I understand my hair to be part of my [ARABIC] that's why I'm covering it. But the fact that it's covered now does not make it not [ARABIC]. I mean, it's covered, but it's still [ARABIC]. If I take my veil off, it means I'm showing my [ARABIC]. I mean, it's like this covered, it's still [ARABIC]. It's still part of my [ARABIC].

So there's a lot of difficulty in trying to translate that into English, but now I'm keeping the word nakedness until I find a better translation. It's very interesting because conversations about [ARABIC] is also conversations about a woman's visibility or debility.

They are conversations about space, the gendering of space, a different conceptualization of space. Not the Western conceptualization of, for instance, a [ARABIC], so public space, and so on. Sorry. I will stop here.

[LAUGHTER]

Thank you.

[LAUGHTER]

ANN D. BRAUDE: Thank you so much. Last, I will turn to Tulasi. Tulasi, your book, The Runaway Goddess, focuses on the city of Bangalore and its transition from the garden city of your childhood to one of the front lines of climate apocalypse in the 21st century.

Why do you think it's important to move away from the eurocentric notion of the Anthropocene toward an approach to climate crisis founded in indigenous Dalit practices and a feminist Hindu theology? What do you hope to accomplish by making such a shift?

[LAUGHTER]

In five minutes.

TULASI SRINIVAS: In five minutes.

[LAUGHTER]

Ann is truly one of the greats because she asked the question that I cannot answer.

[LAUGHTER]

The question that is the challenge of my year here. But as an anthropologist, let me begin with a shared experience. I hope it's shared. Many of you since it's summer must have bathed in the ocean or swam in a pond or dipped your feet in a lake or a river, or perhaps because it's a hot and sweaty day you've drunk from a bottle of water.

And I remember as a child swimming in a natural pond under a lyrically blue sky in my hometown of Bangalore. And I went there a couple of years ago and it is a showroom for the Lamborghini cars. This experience of floating in water is originally it is primordial, it is of the womb, it is natality, it is birth, it is creation.

And so we get the idea and this is why we go to other planets looking for it that water is life. And yet we find that drought and floods have overtaken our world. Look at the Southwest where the Colorado River dries. Look at London with its brown lawns. Look at Beijing or look at Cape Town, which are seconds away from a day zero.

And so then I asked my question. My book, The Absent Goddess, asked this central question-- if water is life, what is life without water? For drought is real. It is inexorable and it is on the horizon. Perhaps this is why water is sacred for all great world religions. It is certainly sacred in Hinduism, which is my area of expertise.

In Hinduism, water is cosmological. It is the force of creation. It is the ocean on which the great God Vishnu, the protector, floats in eternal time. It is the manifest on Earth as the Goddess Ganga who purifies and gives life and cultivation to that which cannot be cultivated. So I look at these feminine images of water and I asked what are we destroying. What are we destroying?

And the word, the Anthropocene, the history of the Anthropocene is a deeply colonial extractive postindustrial, postcolonial critique of industry and capitalism. And sure, it gets us to a lot of places. But where it gets us to it is a description of crises. It gets us to an anthropology of grief. But how do we get to an anthropology of repair? That is the pivot point.

And for that, I turn to the women in the city of Bangalore. Largely indigenous. A group come from a caste of orchard farmers whom I met as she was standing on the edge of a lake that had burst into flame due to pollutants. And she cried. She said, "The goddess has run away from the temple near the lake. Maybe she has been raped by the developers."

So when the goddess runs away what does that say to us? What is the vocabulary that we can use? So if the Anthropocene is no longer valid, perhaps we need to turn to Guri on the edge of the lake to find out her indigenous practices of orchard farming through drought and flood. Or perhaps we should turn to Mariman, who is a Dalit well-digger and farmer, who came from a caste of female well diggers who built mud check dams and ask what is their knowledge of repair.

Because as everyone on this panel, and we are so fortunate to have the year to talk to one another, has argued that colonial knowledge, rational or scientific, and wonderful for it gets us out of pandemics or very close to, is not the only system of knowledge yet it has overridden many other systems of knowledge.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-science. But I am saying there is another form of rationality that we need to pay attention to because we're certainly not getting there with this system. It's not giving us the totality of value of that which we are losing. So we lose it and then we look in the rear-view mirror and we say what have we lost? And by then it is slightly too late. And perhaps Mariman and Guri have an indigenous response that we need to understand.

So my answer to Ann's difficult question is, I know that the archaic capitalist estrangement formulations of the Anthropocene don't get us to a point of respect and healing. It is perhaps to be found at the crumbling edges of what we consider the world that we must turn in order to get these answers to repair.

And so this book is the third part of a three-part series on Bangalore. The first one was An Anthropology of Wonder-- The Cow in the Elevator. The second one which I'm just finishing is An Anthropology of the Sublime, which deals with women and beauty parlors. And the third one will deal with lakes and water and pollution and it will lead us hopefully out of dread and into something better. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

ANN D. BRAUDE: Thank you so much, Tulasi. That was a wonderful note to end on. We're out of time. We don't have time for questions. All I can say is I have the best job in the world.

[LAUGHTER]

I mean, really, you can just imagine the conversations we're going to be having in the Carriage House throughout the year as we workshop chapters and bring these projects to fruition. So come visit us. Come to each one. We'll be giving a research lecture during the year. Come to the lectures and we hope to see you there.

[APPLAUSE]

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SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2020. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.