Surface Reading: Roads, Cyclists and Emergent Politics in India (Feb. 7, 2019)

The Boston University Anthropology Department presents its first
Graduate Lunch Seminar Spring 2019

Surface Reading:

Roads, Cyclists and Emergent Politics in India

Lecture by Associate Professor Jonathan Anjaria 
(Dept. of Anthropology, Brandeis University) 

Thursday, February 7, 2019 at 12:00-1:30 pm
African Studies Seminar Room, Fifth Floor, 232 Bay State Road

Cycling, once relegated to the past, is now the site of vibrant new body cultures in India. Through research conducted between 2015-2018 on cycling cultures in Mumbai, I show that the meaning of recreational cycling often lies in corporeal experiences. For instance, recreational cyclists talk about the pleasures of unexpected social encounters that happen while sensing the road and its textures. Scholarly writings on leisure activities in India, as elsewhere, often focus on symbolic analysis, emphasizing things like class-based distinction. However, I ask, how might we also see cycling as a body culture defined by experimentation—with one’s sense of self, gender, ideas of the body and relation to others? How does meaning emerge through embodied experience? And, what would a mode of critique look like that focuses on the surface of practices rather than, as Rita Felski puts it, exposing what lies beneath?

Jonathan Anjaria is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis. His publications include the book The Slow Boil: Street Food, Public Space and Rights in Mumbai, as well as articles on corruption, street vending, civic activism, citizenship and popular culture in contemporary India, and a co-edited a book on urban South Asia (Urban Navigations: Politics, Space and the City in South Asia, with Colin McFarlane). He is currently researching the cultural life of the bicycle in India.

Please contact Professor Merry White (corky@bu.edu) by Monday February 4 at 5 pm if you would like lunch to be provided.