#espiritokashi

Selected to present Espírito Kashi at the 116th American Anthropological Association Conference in Washington this year end in the panel - Technologies Matter: Exploring Emergent Visual Technologies and Participatory Methods in Anthropology.

Just thinking about those 115 previous meetings. What were they discussing in the first meeting...? Definitely not about participatory methods (haha). Excited to be a part of a fresh debate in a very old network. See you soon Washington!

I will cherish the conversations I had with Vishal Narayan from The Citizen, an online Indian daily. Here’s an excerpt, but do read the full article about my work with Espírito Kashi. 

The worst casualty, as anyone would agree, in the supersonic speed with which we have blanketed the whole world is the local culture, and its peculiarities. ‘Uprooted-ness’ has become something to boast of, and any trace of local is seen as rustic and much to be frowned upon. At the outset it may not seem egregious but the lumping together of traditions is at work, quite subliminally, almost all the time. But the work being done by Nayyar for getting the unsung heroines of Indian folk tales their place under the sun is just as appreciable as it is singular. “Reason is a concentration camp,” he says, at one point during the interview, “our efforts should be directed more at ‘how’ than ‘why’ of things.” His next task is to test the form of ‘ethno-fiction’ to tell stories more eloquently and with an extended poetic license.

When are we reaching the sacred city, Kashi?