Dharma Culture, India
Dharma and Everyday Contemporary Culture in India
Thursday February 10, 2011 - now NEW DATE & TIME!!
Prof. Samuel Parker,University of Washington
This talk examines the heart of India’s morality and values using the concept of “dharma,” often inadequately translated as simply “religion” or “righteousness.” Those of us who have been socialized to value abstract, universal, egalitarian, rights-oriented--and ideally, “context free” principles--for comprehending and acting upon reality may justly feel puzzled or frustrated by contemporary India. The lens of dharma helps to illuminate many things—ranging from big issues of time, space, freedom, caste, democracy and social hierarchy, all the way down to such mundane matters as scheduling, shopping, voting, or who has the “right of way” in India’s famously chaotic traffic.
Samuel Parker is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Tacoma-Seattle area. He holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology awarded by the University of Chicago in 1989, however his work straddles the disciplines of Asian and Pacific art history and cultural anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork in India and Bali where his primary area of focus has been on contemporary practices of Hindu temple construction. Recently he has been working on the contemporary framing of ancient Hindu monuments by the institutions of cultural tourism in India. His work has appeared in many top journals, including Artibus Asiae, Ars Orientalis, Oceania, Bijdragen, Res, Museum Anthropology, Pacific Studies, South Asian Studies, and others.
Registration
Free of charge. Everybody is most welcome.