E003: Authority and its Contradictions: Expressive Traditions and Contested Futures in Kerala, South India

Organizer(s)

• HR

  Helena Reddington

  McGill University, Canada

Chair(s)

• LL

  Leah Lowthorp

  University of Oregon, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• HR

  Helena Reddington

  McGill University, Canada
• VS

  Victoria Sheldon

  University of Toronto, Canada
• LL

  Leah Lowthorp

  University of Oregon, United States
• VB

  Vincent Brillant-Giroux

  University of Toronto, United States

Session Abstract: How are memories of the past called upon and ethically reworked as performers, healers, and ritual specialists critique social change and craft new futures? How do their articulations of the past challenge us to rethink the relationship between collective memories and authoritative claims about appropriate future change? This panel explores the interface of expressive practice and modernity in south India. There has been important research on the idealized imagining of the past through expressive arts (Peterson and Soneji eds. 2008). Building on this, the papers in this panel consider how in the process of performers invoking reference to idealized pasts, they articulate and contest future possibilities. Each paper illuminates how skilled practitioners imaginatively revive past memories into the present tense, in order to reshape future authoritative possibilities.

In this panel, we use the term ‘authority’ to refer to the ways that performers and practitioners call upon and challenge caste, education, kinship, and genre as they disrupt, revive, or articulate continuities within idealized traditions. By employing the term ‘expressive traditions,’ we bring together performing arts, ritual theatre and therapeutic practices, insofar as they similarly frame the body as a site of ethical articulation, narrative retelling, and religious belonging. At the same time, they invoke ideals of the past in order to articulate and contest future aspirations. This panel more broadly questions static boundaries between performance, ritual, and healing, as they each grapple with the contradictions inherent in discursive claims and their interpersonal enactments.

Presentations:

• The Power and Perils of Satire in the Tullal Genre of Kerala
  

  Paper Presenter: Helena Reddington – McGill University
• Health as Expression: Historicizing the Present through Nature Cure Revivalism in Kerala
  

  Paper Presenter: Victoria Sheldon – University of Toronto
• Folk-colonial Critique: Legendary Pasts and the Present in Kutiyattam Sanskrit Theater
  

  Paper Presenter: Leah Lowthorp – University of Oregon
• Ritual Changes in Process: Embodying Authority as Possession is Questioned in Ancestor Worship Rituals of Kerala
  

  Paper Presenter: Vincent Brillant-Giroux – University of Toronto