Dr Piers Vitebsky delivered the 2024 MN Srinivas Lecture titled 'The village remembered, but by whom? Adivasi futures and the vernacular afterlives of fieldnotes'.
Since Dr Piers Vitebsky first lived with the Sora, a tribe in southern Odisha, in 1975, their world has changed out of all recognition. At that time, the non-literate Sora religion revolved around a unique form of dialogues with their dead, who spoke through the mouths of shamans in trance. In this intimate cyclical cosmology, dialogues with the dead blended a selective remembering with a ritually paced forgetting. Today, ancestors have become forgotten in a more abrupt and total way, abandoned by younger Sora who have entered government schooling and converted to a range of Christian or Hindu sects. These new religions offer their own gods, scripts and cosmic temporalities, but at the price of forgetting dead parents and rejecting their cultural forms.
The ethnographer has accumulated a huge archive of oral texts, recordings, photos and life stories. Initially these were for his own research purposes, but they are now acquiring an unforeseen role for young Sora themselves as they try to recall a way of life they have never experienced first-hand, and which left no written traces. When he returns extracts from this material, they go viral on mobile phones and provoke songs and weeping, as young Sora re-imagine their past and feed it into their construction of new Sora futures. The ethnographer is torn between memories of his old friends, now mostly dead, and his duty to the new imaginations and aspirations of their grandchildren.
This event took place on 28 May 2024.
More about the King's India Institute: www.kcl.ac.uk/kii
11 июн 2024
