20/05/2024 12:15 - 13:15

HALL: FATESI - STURZO

Proponent: Pati G.

Chair: Pintchman T.

Speaker: James R., Pati G., Pintchman T.

The papers in this panel examine religion, space, and identity in various contexts in Kerala and discuss paradigm shifts. The papers collectively emphasize that earlier dominant narratives are problematic, and ongoing discourses about religion, bodies, and spaces must seriously consider narratives from below, a paradigm shift, to contribute to historical debates on religion. The first paper investigates Dhobi Khana in Kochi, wherein the Vannan community actively contests the entrenched narratives of religion, caste, ethnicity, and gender, contributing to the paradigm shift of the socio-spatial discourse in Fort Kochi. The second paper examines the embodiment of divinities during the annual festival at a temple in Thiruvalla, Kerala, and argues that shifting our gaze on the parading divine bodies problematizes our understanding of the body, divine and human, polluted and pure, and the social dimensions of caste and its historical religious valorization, thereby presenting a paradigm shift.