Trial lecture (recording): The role of religion in the making of contemporary political subjectivities
Ex auditorio opponents: Please raise your hand in Zoom to serve as an ex-auditorio opponent as the second opponent completes their questions.
Adjudication Committee:
- Dr Anne de Sales, LESC – Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology, Paris, France
- Reader Glyn Williams, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
- Professor Sverre Johan Herstad, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo
Chair of Defence:
- Professor Kristian Stokke, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo
Supervisors:
- Professor Karen O'Brien, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo
- Professor Caglar Gülay, Gender and Diversity Division, Freie University, Berlin, Germany
Anarchist Reading of Political Myths of Power in Rural Nepal
My thesis explores how and why resistances against power’s many mythic, archaic, ancestral, and patriarchal forms, fail to transform its logic constructed in relations of hierarchy and domination within statist regimes. Through an anarchist reading, the thesis presents a mythological interpretation of how current Nepali politics does not annihilate but simply reconfigure the conditions of hierarchy and domination constructed within social formations where both the dominant and the minority exercise political power. It shows how subjectivities of resistance are governed mythologically such that, as the minority gain political power, they successfully invoke the myth of power itself: that power resists hierarchy and domination. This myth becomes effective because politics is not opposed to the logic of power in statist regimes. Rather, my thesis demonstrates that politics fundamentally perpetuates power’s logic.
The thesis therefore establishes how local political processes become an arena for political mythmaking—the process whereby certain historical, material, and ideological structures of government endure as truth narratives, or mythologies. In rural Nepali politics of the federal era, it explores how individuals engage the activity government—of self and others—through which individuals become subjects and subjects become mythic symbols of power. By mythic symbols, I understand individuals who become state’s subjects through their state-sanctioned, hierarchically adjusted minority identity. Mythic symbols become sacrificial subjects entrapped in a religio mortis (religion of death) as they struggle for the power to govern by conquering power’s symbols. The political myth manifests itself: that subjects and subjectivities of resistance transform the conditions of hierarchy and domination in state-based politics as they gain political power. The thesis invites you to read this myth not merely with the aim of exposing its effects but to empty it of its meaning.
- Scientific abstract (English, pdf)
For more information:
Contact Katalin Varga