Congratulations Shweta Radhakrishnan winner of a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant

The Department congratulates Shweta Radhakrishnan who recently won a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. One of the most prestigious awards for ethnographic research, the Foundation’s goal is “to support vibrant and significant work that furthers our understanding of what it means to be human.” Here is a summary of Shweta’s project: 

In 2008, a group of ritual possession specialists/oracles in Kerala came together to form a trade-union like collective. Their initial demands included better safeguards and protections, such as health insurance, pensions, swords issued by the State with safety seals, welfare schemes specifically for oracles, etc. The collective has since expanded its activities to include campaigns for protecting the rights of the Goddess and her oracles. This project examines why a group of religious actors felt compelled to organize and model their collective in the image of a trade union and how and why the conceptual categories of work/labor became significant for ritual actors in Kerala in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. As ritual actors attempted to render worship legible as work/labor, this project explores what kinds of ethical subjectivities and communities were made possible through these attempts at translation.