Event Details:

Professor Paromita Sanyal will present on her latest book 'Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies (2018, Cambridge University Press).'Oral Democracy studies citizens' voices in civic and political deliberations in India's village assemblies. These assemblies are grassroots institutions of participatory democracy and the largest deliberative institution in human history.

The presentation will focus on the typology of citizens' performances and state enactments identified across four South Indian states and suggest explanations for the vast statewise differences. It will emphasize that citizens' oral participation in development and governance can be improved by strengthening deliberative spaces through policy, and this can be achieved even in conditions of high inequality and illiteracy. The presentation will introduce the concepts of "oral competence" and "oral democracy" to aid the understanding of deliberative systems in nonwestern and 'developing' countries and show how these concepts might be useful to understand the interactions of marginalized groups with the state even in highly 'developed' countries.

 

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and College of Social Science