Centre for the Study of Social Systems
School of Social Sciences
CSSS Colloquium
Mukulika Banerjee
(Associate Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science)
Will be presenting a paper on
Cultivating Democracy: The Social Imaginaries of Political Competition
Date & Time: May 1st, 2018 (Tuesday), 3.00 pm
Venue: CSSS Committee Room (No: 13), SSS-II
Abstract: This paper is drawn from a monograph (under prep) entitled Cultivating Democracy based on long term ethnographic research in rural West Bengal. Through a case study of a sexual scandal that rocked the villages of Madanpur and Chishti, the paper will explore how ideas of political competition, ethical behaviour and political alliance are formed in social life. It will demonstrate how this one scandal can be linked to dramatic electoral reversals that take place in the village nearly ten years later. It will draw on Charles Taylor’s idea of the social imaginary to explore how ideas about democratic politics are often cultivated in non-institutional political spaces and to help explain popular practices and imagination about democracy in India.
Bio: Mukulika Banerjee is the inaugural Director of the LSE South Asia Centre and is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at LSE. She studied in Delhi and Oxford universities and taught at Oxford and UCL before joining LSE. She has conducted ethnographic research in Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa (NWFP), Pakistan between 1990-1993 and in India since 1998. She has published Why India Votes? (2014), The Pathan Unarmed (2001) and The Sari(2003) and Muslim Portraits (2007). She is currently completing a monograph entitled Cultivating Democracy on the social imaginaries of democracy based on fifteen years of research in rural India.