International Center for Ethnic Studies
cordially invites you to a lecture

by
Dr. Edward Simpson
(Lecturer, Anthropology Department, Goldsmiths College, University of London)

on
Nationalism and Other Memory Practices
Following the Gujarat Earthquake of 2001

on
Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 5:30 p.m.

at the
ICES Auditorium,
02, Kynsey Terrace, Colombo 08

Edward Simpson’s research has focused on the State of Gujarat. He has conducted two major research projects in the region to date. The first examined contemporary networks of trade, politics and Islam in the Indian Ocean through research on the lives of ordinary shipbuilders, sailors and merchants. This work has led to a number of publications on contemporary and popular Islam in South Asia.This lecture will explore the politics of reconstruction and some of the competing memorial practices that emerged after devastating earthquake in western India during 2001. The material is drawn from extensive ethnographic research and analyses of the politics of rehabilitation in the “prememorial era,” the period before an official memorial (s) is erected when the gap between the signified (the earthquake) and the signifier (the memorial) is still wide open and meanings and narratives of the disaster are being created, rehearsed and contested. Many of the reconstruction initiatives undertaken after the disaster are inseparable from the politics of contemporary Hindu nationalism in India. Consequently, the main sections of the lecture examine the political nature of memorial practices and ideas about reconstruction in relation to expressions of nationalism and regionalism.