Lecture: Gerrit Lange on Relationships in the Himalayas Beyond the Human
External venue
No April Fools’ joke!
On Wednesday, April 1, our colleague Gerrit Lange will be visiting Ghent: As part of the lecture series “More-than-human South Asia: Ecologies, Knowledge, Bodies, and Senses,” he will present the latest insights from his research.
His lecture, “A Family Meeting with Nagini Mata: Establishing Relations with the Serpent World, Trees, Grasses, and Rivers in a Himalayan Valley,” focuses on non-human beings in the Hinduism of the Central Himalayas—including trees, rivers, and serpent goddesses. Even seemingly insignificant actors such as cherry trees, a mysterious grass, and even the underworld make an appearance. Gerrit combines ethnographic perspectives with approaches from the aesthetics of religion as well as recent theories of animism.
Thus, animism—in the sense of Graham Harvey, for example—is no longer understood as a “primitive religion,” but rather as a way of life in a world full of persons, only some of whom are human.
