array(2) { [0]=> string(4) "toto" [1]=> string(4) "titi"} Aesthetics and the Vernacular: Cultural Products and New Elites in the Indus Valley and Beyond

Les ateliers du quinquennal 2019-2023 |

Aesthetics and the Vernacular: Cultural Products and New Elites in the Indus Valley and Beyond

Coordinator: Michel Boivin (CEIAS)

 

The thematic workshop "Aesthetics and the Vernacular: Cultural Products and New Elites in the Sindhi Area and Beyond" is part of the rebuilding of two workshops from the previous five-year period: "Vernacular Cultures and New Muslim Elites in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia" and "Gujarati and Sindhi Studies: Societies, Languages and Cultures". The emphasis is shifted towards cultural productions, particularly visual ones, in that they inform us of the interaction between the construction of Sindhi vernacular knowledge and the production of an elite in the colonial and post-colonial era. Through the renewal of this workshop, it is a question of incorporating a field largely neglected by the Social Sciences covering a vast domain that extends from numismatics to cinema. The use of the term "aesthetic" refers first and foremost to the primary meaning of the Greek word aisthitikos of "perception by the senses". But to use Christopher Pinney's formula, it is also a question of focusing on "the collapse of the social into aesthetic" (Pinney 2004: 11) but with a particular focus on the vernacular elites that we will call the intelligentsia. Moreover, the premise is that cultural products are a privileged place to analyse the interactions between social and religious issues.

The workshop aims to question the interactions between aesthetics and the vernacular that can be articulated around an axiomatic problem: how does aesthetics, conceived primarily as a set of cultural productions, contribute to the emergence of vernacular knowledge in contemporary South Asia? The relationship to aesthetics will certainly be questioned through the intervention of specialists, but the workshop will nevertheless follow Richard Davis when he states that cultural products "are primarily grounded not in universal aesthetic principles of sculptural form or in common human psychology of perception, but more significantly in varied (and often conflicting) cultural notions of divinity, representation, and authority" (Davis 1999 : 8).

Although Sindh has often been described as a kind of isolate, due to its geographical position far from the centres of power, such as Delhi, it is clear that the construction of the vernacular was carried out through the continuous circulation of cultural paradigms. Therefore, it will be important to situate the Sindhi vernacular in a regional context, i.e. mirroring adjacent countries such as Punjab, Gujarat, Rajasthan. Consequently, the workshop will have to bring together specialists from different disciplines around the Sindhi regional fact, but also in its interactions with adjacent regions and other territories belonging to South Asia and beyond. This undertaking will be carried out mainly through the investigation of Sindhi cultural corpuses produced in Sindh, now in Pakistan, India, and the South Asian diaspora.  

Nevertheless, this workshop will be the only one focusing on the Sindhi vernacular outside South Asia. This means that the international vocation of the workshop will be reflected in its members, who will belong to the CEIAS, but also to other European institutions. In addition, the workshop will attach the greatest importance to dialogue with other workshops, CEIAS and others, which share the same interests in other regions of South Asia, as well as in other cultural areas.

Three areas of activity are envisaged:

(1) The workshop will provide a forum for researchers (members or not of the workshop) to present their work to CEIAS, in continuity with the two previous workshops.

(2) The workshop will continue to maintain its research notebook "Sindhi Studies Group: Society, Culture and Territory" (https://sindh.hypotheses.org/) for communication and scientific monitoring purposes, through the publication of various content posts (announcements of conferences, symposia and publications; reviews; posts on ongoing research).

(3) The workshop will operate on a regular basis in working seminars on Sindhi cultural products in order to conduct a collective reflection between the specialists who are members of the workshop and researchers working on cultural corpuses, whether the latter are in Sindhi, from another South Asian region or in adjacent areas such as the Iranian world. The objective is to bring together and exchange researchers from different backgrounds based on cultural corpuses, examined from the angles of different disciplines. It will be a question of crossing the various possible approaches (anthropological, geographical, historical, philological, etc.) in order to draw benefits from this multidisciplinary approach.

Finally, one of the priorities of the workshop will be to constitute a documentary resource composed of cultural corpuses produced within the Sindh area. It will include in particular hard-to-reach sources such as corpora of texts, published and handwritten, photographic corpora of sites, corpora of recorded devotional songs, filmed interviews with informants, visual documents of all kinds, etc.

The guest (member or not of the workshop, specialist in visual productions, sindhologist or not) will present, on one or more sessions, his corpus, the questions he addresses to him, the approaches (methodological, disciplinary) he adopts to exploit it.

 

Selected bibliography

Blair, Sheila S., and Jonathan M. Bloom (1994). The Art and Architecture of Islam 1250-1800. Yale : Yale University Press.

Blurton, T. Richard (1992). Hindu Art. London : British Museum Press.

Boivin, Michel (2011). Artefacts of Devotion. A Sufi Repertoire of the Qalandariyya in Sehwan Sharif, Sindh (Pakistan). Karachi : OUP.

Cousens, Henry (1998). The Antiquities of Sind with historical outline. Karachi: Department of Culture Government of Sindh (1st Ed. 1929).

Davis, Richards T., Lives of indian Images, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999.

Edwards, Holly (2015). Of brick and Myth. The Genesis of Islamic Architecture in the Indus Valley. Karachi : OUP.

Flood, Finbarr Barry (2009). Objects of Translation. Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter. Princeton and Oxford : Princeton University Press.

Gell, Alfred (1998). Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kalhoro, Zulfiqar Ali (2014). Art and Architecture of Sindh. Karachi : Endowment Fund Trust for Preservation

Lari, Sohail (1995). A History of Sindh. Karachi : OUP.

Pinney, Christopher (2004). ‘Photos of the Gods’. Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London : Reaktion Books.

Roy, Anjali Gera (2015). Cinema of Enchantment : Perso-Arabic Genealogies of the Hindi Masala Film. Hyderabad : Orient Blackswan.

Schimmel, Annemarie (1974). Sindhi Literature. Wiesbaden : Otto Harrassowitz.

Zaidi, Saima (Ed.) (2009). Design and Visual Culture in Pakistan. Karachi : OUP.



 

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