Senior Research Seminar with Dr Lisa Björkman (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)

Senior Research Seminar with Dr Lisa Björkman (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)Drama of Democracy: enacting representation in Mumbai

In an era of global political passions, many have wondered whether some sort of natural affinity exists between political style and substance. Does liberal democracy speak the language of rationality and sincerity while political emotion, imagery, and embodiment properly belong to authoritarianism? In this seminar, Lisa Björkman discusses her new book Drama of Democracy, which takes an ethnographic approach to these questions. Drawing on a decade of research in the Indian city of Mumbai, Björkman will discuss how embodied performance is the very site and substance of representation, and demonstrates how Mumbaikars evaluate performative bids to represent. The ethnographic accounts demonstrate the extraordinary fluency in this evaluative work in Mumbai, where people from all walks of life are remarkably astute at navigating and assessing political signs and representations, endlessly discussing and debating possible meanings of the city’s dense material-semiotic ecologies—whether words or images, cash or crowds, flyers or flowers. In Mumbai, the book demonstrates, the evaluative criterion of representation is not whether something is sign or substance, or even whether people are deemed to utter truths or falsehoods. Rather, what matters is whether and how a performance activates and actuates the social relations and political subjectivities that it professes to display. Drama of Democracy highlights Mumbaikars’ communicative fluency and theatrical acumen to offer a conceptual toolbox through which contemporary political churnings around the globe might be understood.