Witch-hunts in India… and elsewhere

Panel discussion on the book
 
Witch-hunts in India… and elsewhere
Authored by
Govind Kelkar and Dev Nathan
On
30th August, 2019 (Friday)
Time: 3.00- 5.00 PM
Venue: Durgabai Deshmukh Memorial Lecture Hall, CSD,
Sangha Rachna, 53 Lodi Estate, New Delhi 110003

About the Book: The book looks at witch-hunts as a gendered process in the creation and re-creation of patriarchy as it interacts with changes in socio-economic systems. These gendered socio-economic processes are linked with conflicts in the realm of culture and ideas, and the notions of evil. This articulation of a culture of witchcraft beliefs with gender struggles and socio-economic transformation is used to explain why any woman in the concerned communities could be a witch, while only some few categories of men could be witches.

The explanatory framework is used to understand witch hunts among indigenous peoples in central India, using 110 case studies. The meaning and the social context of witch hunts change in both patriarchal and broader socio-economic transformations, as from non-accumulative to accumulative societies, with conflicts in value systems and normative customs. With this analytical approach the book links the analysis of this phenomenon in India with existing literature on witch hunts in parts of Africa, Amazonia and Oceania and also early modern Europe.

The book simultaneously look deliberates on   de-exoticizing   witchcraft beliefs and witch hunts among indigenous and rural societies, in India and eliminates European exceptionalism in the history of witch hunts.

Discussants:

Virginius Xaxa is an anthropologist. He has taught at NEHU, Delhi University, TISS and, most recently, at Tezpur University.

Patricia Mukhim is Editor of the Shillong Times.  She has published a collection Waiting for an Equal World: Gender in India’s North-east.

Chair: Prof K B Saxena, Distinguished Professor, CSD.

About the Authors:
Govind Kelkar is Visiting Professor at the Council for Social Development (CSD), Delhi. She is a well-known feminist scholar with a number of concurrent assignments on the gendering of energy, environment and land rights of rural women.

Dev Nathan is Visiting Professor at the Institute for Human Development, Delhi and Visiting Research Scholar at the Duke University GVC Center, USA.  An economist he works on many areas of development policy