Suchergebnisse

AbstractAll the elements of twentieth-century politics in Tamilnadu cohere in 1918–1919: human and natural rights, women's rights, the labor movement, linguistic nationalism, and even the politics of caste reservation. Much has been written of how this politics was mediated by newspapers, handbills, and chapbooks, and the dominant narrative of such events privileges the circulation of print and print culture of vernacular language. This paper explores the relatively lesser-known story of the role and impact of vernacular oratory on the development of the mass political in Tamilnadu from the Swadeshi movement (1905–1908) to the formation of labor unions (1917–1919), and the explicit attempt to persuade non-elites into speech, action, and ultimately politics. I argue that Tamil oratory was an infrastructural element in the production of the political, at least the political as we understand it in twentieth-century Tamilnadu, where oratory became the defining activity of political practice. When elites made the conscious move to begin addressing the common man, when Everyman was called to join into the political, a new agency was formed along with a new definition of what politics would look like. The paper considers what such new agency and definitions entail in pursuit of a better understanding of what constitutes the political generally and the Tamil political in particular.

En este artículo se examinan las características tropológicas en las declaraciones de alabanza que los subordinados ofrecen a sus líderes políticos en de las prácticas democráticas de mediados de los noventa en Tamilnadu, India. La alabanza ejecutada por los subordinados corresponde a una lógica cultural ancestral enla producción de poder en el territorio tamil, mediante la que el alabador participa de la grandeza del alabado en el momento preciso de nombrarla. Tras continuar con un debate sobre una antropología general del tropo, el artículo se centra en un único paradigma trópico tamil llamado akupeyar, "palabras transformadas", una tropología que favorece la contigüidad o la indicidad -la metonimia o la sinécdoque-. Estas relaciones de significado caracterizan los vínculos que los partidarios políticos evocan en las alabanzas de sus líderes. El artículo finaliza con un debate sobre el trabajo de expertos en el campo tropológico, tales como: A. K. Ramanujan y Roman Jakobson, quienes argumentan que algunos tropos pueden ser vistos como "tropos maestros", es decir, como formas de organizar los paradigmas de una cultura, unas personas, o una época. ; This paper examines the tropological characteristics of declarations of praise subordinates offer to their political leaders within the democratic practices of mid-1990's Tamilnadu, India. Praise by subordinates is an ancient cultural logic in the production of power in the Tamil lands, a logic by which the praiser participates in the greatness of the praised at the very moment of naming that greatness. Following a discussion of a general anthropology of tropes, the paper outlines a uniquely. Tamil tropic paradigm called akupeyar, "transformed words", a tropology that favors contiguity or indexicality -metonymy or synecdoche-. These relationships of meaning characterise the relationships political supporters evoke in the praise of their leaders. The paper ends with a discussion the work of the tropologically oriented scholars, A.K. Ramanujan and Roman Jakobson, who argued that some tropes can be seen as "master tropes", i.e. as organizing paradigms of a culture, a people, or an epoch.

This article considers the production of the Tamil sermon in Christian and Saivite practices in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon, and the fateful entailments of oratory to far larger realms of practice. I will discuss a series of Saivite sermons delivered by Arumuga Navalar (1821–79) in the late 1840s and early 1850s in terms of their antecedents in Christian sermons. I will also consider the role of communicative practices in the production of what we understand today as 'religion'. The discussion will begin with an orientation to the role of communicative genres within religion. I will then move to an account of Arumuga Navalar and his times, provide some rather detailed descriptions of the events in question, and close with the sig-nificance of shifts in speech genres to transformations of larger-scale socio-cultural and political-economic organization.

Word, Sound, Image: The Life of the Tamil Text. Saskia Kersenboom. Washington, DC: Berg Publishers, 1995. 259 pp. (Includes "Bairavi Varnam" CD‐i.)

Throughout history, speech and storytelling have united communities and mobilized movements. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern examines this phenomenon in Tamil-speaking South India over the last three centuries, charting the development of political oratory and its influence on society. Supplementing his narrative with thorough archival work, Bernard Bate begins with Protestant missionaries' introduction of the sermonic genre and takes the reader through its local vernacularization. What originally began as a format of religious speech became an essential political infrastructure used to galvanize support for new social imaginaries, from Indian independence to Tamil nationalism. Completed by a team of Bate's colleagues, this ethnography marries linguistic anthropology to performance studies and political history, illuminating new geographies of belonging in the modern era.

From twilight in the Himalayas to dream worlds in the Serbian state, this book provides a unique collection of anthropological and cross-cultural inquiry into the power of rhetorical tropes and their relevance to the formation and analysis of social thought and action through a series of ethnographic essays offering in-depth studies of the human imagination at work and play around the world