Lecture by Bhrigupati Singh on ‘Can a Neighbourhood Fall Sick?: Opioid Addiction, Collective Violence and Currents of Death in Contemporary India' [Critical Humanities event]. It was moderated by Prathama Banerjee. The respondents to the lecture were Shalini Singh and Alex Nading.
This lecture examines concepts of psychic life that anthropology and social theory might offer, in conversation with psychiatry. Focussing on neighbourhoods as a unit of analysis, it places India in the context of an emerging global opioid epidemic, and examines sharply varying patterns of addiction and levels of collective violence across demographically similar neighbourhoods in South Asia. As such, it suggests how anthropology might study symptoms and offer particular kinds of diagnosis, in ways that matter for understanding trajectories of illness, addiction, violence and psychic life.
Click to Read the Background Article to Facilitate the Discussion.
Bhrigupati Singh is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Ashoka University, and Visiting Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Brown University. He works at the intersection of religion, mental health, media, and popular culture. He is the author of Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India, Chicago University Press, 2015.
Respondents
Shalini Singh is Assistant Professor at National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre, AIIMS, New Delhi.
Alex Nading is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University, US.
Moderator
Prathama Banerjee is Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Friday, 29 January 2021, 9 pm, Zoom http://bit.ly/3bWmhLJ
