ALL WELCOME
Tuesday 30 May 2017
4.30–6.00 Mond Building Seminar Room
Michael Puett
University of Harvard
Master, Host, Demon, God
Hosting is a key notion among the mobile societies of Inner Asia. But it is an equally recurrent theme among the relatively sedentary societies of China. This paper will attempt to develop the comparative implications of the concept of hosting by exploring the theme across a wide range of practices in China in which the interplay of the sedentary and the mobile plays a major role. I will argue that, when taken seriously, hosting allows us to rethink many of our other anthropological categories, including cosmology, kinship, and kingship.
ALL WELCOME
Tuesday 16 May 2017
4.30–6.00 Mond Building Seminar Room
Anastasia Piliavsky
University of Cambridge
Masterhood, hierarchy and political responsibility in North India’s democratic politics
Idioms of masterhood, patronage and kingship in India’s popular politics have prompted suggestions that India is not a true representative democracy, where sovereign citizens hold politicians responsible for delivering what they want, but a top-down system of inequality and coercive rule. I suggest that, to the contrary, the democratic process I have observed over a dozen years across rural and urban northern India, is robustly representative. What confuses external analysts is the fact that here hierarchy – and the hierarchical master-servant relations - which we treat as democracy’s greatest foe, is itself the core structure of representation and mechanism of political responsibility. I show that to place demands on politicians and hold them responsible, voters deliberately and insistently elevate leaders above themselves as patrons or masters. It is precisely through this relation that they can demand political responsibility. My ethnography further challenges the equation of power and status, which is widely assumed in social analysis today – the idea that the higher a person stands the more power they have over others. I show that hierarchy, as a structure of expectations, upturns this formulation. Superiors have more power, but they also bear a greater degree of responsibility, an idea that gives those below great leverage over political grandees, who must act according to their standing. These are, of course, ideal horizons, but their force is not diminished by the difficulty of their attainment.
ALL WELCOME
Tuesday 2 May 2017
4.30–6.00 Mond Building Seminar Room
Charlotte Bruckermann
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
The Mistress of the Hearth: female mobility, domestic divinities, and reproductive power in North Central China
Anthropological concepts of masterhood and hospitality are particularly elaborated among highly mobile people whose movements put them into constant contact with strangers to whom they may extend hospitality and thereby assume sovereignty over these guests. In the sedentary Han Chinese context, offering kindnesses to strangers as hospitality is deemed less important than hosting known relations. For instance, humans host deities as their masters, and thereby extend the male household or community hosts’ sovereignty over attendees. This paper examines how this interplay between mobility and hosting plays out for Chinese women in north-central Shanxi Province, where women’s sociality is ruptured by mobility as they move at marriage and become outsiders of the patrilineages for whom they bear offspring. Women subvert their outsider status within Chinese kinship by appealing to a divine mistress of the hearth both as a stranger and as kin. Women also compete to extend their sovereignty over kin across domestic divides by hosting celebrations of their reproductive powers and thereby claim offspring. The analytical crux between female mobility and the mistress/hostess reveals the subversive potential of being both stranger and kin, situated both outside of and at the centre of reproduction
A lunchtime seminar will be held in the Mond Building Seminar Room, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF
Wednesday 26 April 2017, 12.30–1.30
All welcome
Tinley Namgyal
Independent Researcher, Tibet Autonomous Region
The revival of a Milarepa shrine in Tibet: a first hand account
Abandoned during the Cultural Revolution, the holy shrine of Trakar Taso in south-western Tibet was gradually revived in the late 1980s. Linked to the great Tibetan mystic Milarepa (c. 1052 – c. 1135 CE), this site was famous as a pilgrimage destination, a monastery and an early printing house. As such it appears in many historical accounts and its revival has had a huge symbolic significance. In this extra seminar, one of the protagonists of this process will offer an account of his experience as a rare opportunity to explore the interface between Tibetan civil society and the state in the management of Tibetan cultural heritage.
The Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU) at Cambridge has partnered with the Centre of Ethnographic Theory (SOAS) for a Seminar series (2016-2017) titled “Masterhood, Hospitality, and Mobility.”
The notion of the ‘master/owner’ (Mong. ezen, Tib. bdag) is extraordinarily prevalent across Inner Asia. It appears not only as a multi-scalar idea in social realms, as a way of conceptualising the ruler of a state, guardian of property, host, or manager of a household; it is also evidently a cosmological notion, spanning a vast range from spirit owner or master of a territory to the ‘masters’ of wild animal species, geological formations, or even human-made implements. This master/owner concept is relational, and it implies many of the positional switches found in hospitality: the generosity to others, including strangers, expected of the host, but on the cosmological plane something like a reversal, when offerings are made by a human host to an invited master or owning spirit to give thanks or in hope of gaining favour. The ambiguity about who (when) is a host/master/owner, and who the guest, may be related – we suggest for debate – to the nature of a mobile society, where both human and spirit masters/owners circulate. These alternating relations we suggest may bear on seemingly paradoxical concepts of landscape, in particular understandings of the sacred sites where spirit masters hold sway, such as the Mongolian oboo, the Tibetan lha-tse, the Tyvan ovaa or the Buriat barisa, where it is characteristic for such a site to be seen both as a centre and as a boundary marker. Following the idea that some regions provide the opportunity to pursue particular problems in anthropological theory, we would like this seminar to pose the idea of the ‘master/owner’ as a concept-cum-heuristic. We aim in this way to reflect on the wider potential of ethnographic theory emerging from Inner Asia as a path to reconfiguring debates on the relation between place and power, incorporation and exclusion, cosmology and action and examine how these concepts and subjectivities are reproduced or domesticated by gendered rituals practices and strategies of alliance in the region.
See poster for details of the upcoming talks in the series during the Easter term:
masterhood 2017
