Tamilen haben eine bemerkenswert lange Geschichte, sich als eigene, abgegrenzte "Community" mit besonderen sozialen Eigenschaften wahrzunehmen. CeMIS in Kooperation mit den Universitäten Heidelberg und Tübingen plant daher, ein Netzwerk für Tamilstudien einzurichten, um dieses Phänomen genauer zu untersuchen. Der erste Workshop des Netzwerks wird sich mit "Rituals of Community and Political Ritual: The Making and Remaking of a Tamil People" beschäftigen. Er findet am 7. und 8. Juni 2013 am CeMIS statt.
Für weitere Informationen wenden Sie sich bitte bis zum 15. März 2013 an Ulrike Schroeder <ulrike.schroeder@wts.uni-heidelberg.de>. Falls Sie präsentieren wollen, senden Sie bitte bis zum 1. April 2013 ein Abstrakt an Rupa Viswanath <rviswan@gwdg.de>. Die endgültige Auswahl wird bis zum 21. April 2013 getroffen.

Call for Paper
Rituals of Community and Political Ritual: The Making and Remaking of a Tamil People

Tamils have a remarkably long history of imagining themselves as a distinctive “community” with culturally and socially unique traits. From the clear counterposition of cultured Tamil against its dialectal variants as well as against Sanskrit that one finds in the earliest Tamil grammar Tolkappiyam (c. 8th century CE), to the heated linguistic policy debates of the 20th century and the rise of Dravidian nationalism, Tamils across the centuries have, in distinctive and historically specific ways, produced ideas of what being a (proper) Tamil person means and what an (ideal) Tamil society should look like.

For the first meeting of the network, we hope to examine some of the practices and strategies used to create Tamil subjects, to make what in modern democratic jargon is called “a people.” What forms of moral, ethical and pedagogical work have been carried out to produce a Tamil people? What routines and rituals—religious, political, domestic, bodily, and so on—have been introduced to faciltiate or in other ways accompany these processes? What different forms have practices of people-making taken in different sub-regional milieux and under different political-religious regimes? We invite papers from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, Indologists, scholars of religion and others whose empirical research pertains to these broad thematic concerns. Topics that might be addressed include, but are not limited too:

Rituals and sovereignty

Violence and community

Gender regimes and Tamilness

Populism as politics in the postcolonial Tamil world

Religion and/as Tamilness

Elite and subaltern Tamils

Conceptions of caste and castelessness in Tamil society

“Othering” in Tamil social worlds