Moderation:  Júlia Garraio (CES)


Overview

This presentation will discuss the mobilisation of religious imagery, the dehumanisation of women from Other communities, and the loss of gender solidarities that remain integral to inter-religious riots in the genealogies of global violence. Using Paul Brass’ concept of ‘institutional riot systems’, the presentation will highlight how women from multiple social, religious and economic strata can become unlikely and unpredictable ‘riot specialists’, who not only keep communal animosities alive, but they also play a significant role in turning minor events into large-scale, protracted conflict. Using ethnographic studies from diverse regions of South Asia, the presentation will show how the mechanisms of riots have a universal functional utility for large sections of radicalised, partisan women, and sporadic or continuous outbreaks of violence enable women to consolidate their religious and political position in wider masculinist societies.  
 

Bio note

Atreyee Sen is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She is author of Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (2007), and co-editor of Global Vigilantes (2008) and Who’s Cashing in? Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness (2020). Some of her journal articles include ‘Torture and Laughter: Naxal Insurgency, Custodial Violence, and Inmate Resistance in a Women’s Correctional Facility in 1970s Calcutta’, Modern Asian Studies (2018), and “Teach Your Girls to Stab, Not Sing’: Right-Wing Activism, Public Knife Distribution and the Politics of Gendered Self-Defense in Mumbai’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2019). Her recent publications (so far in 2022) are ‘An Economy of Lies: Informal Income, Phone-Banking and Female Migrant Workers in Kolkata, India' in Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, ‘Clear and Present Danger: Dodging and Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty in Everyday Life,’ in Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives: Logics of Precariousness in Everyday Contexts edited by Beata Świtek; Allen Abramson; Hannah Swee, and 'Religious Spaces, Urban Poverty, and Interfaith Relations in India' in Current History. 

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