Meet Joel Lee, the new Assistant Professor of Anthropology
in conversation with Susie Paul ’16:
What courses are you teaching at Williams this semester?
Anthro 101 and a seminar on Islam and Anthropology. The line-up next year, in addition to 101 (which we’ve recently renamed “How to be Human”), is Language and Power (an introduction to linguistic anthropology), Trash (on waste, culture and the production of value, with the perspectives of sanitation workers as a guide), and a seminar on Caste, Race and Hierarchy.
What led you to specialize in South Asian studies, religion, and literature?
The arbitrary decision of a nineteen-year-old, plus curiosity, disposition, friendship. I first went to India during college, on a Buddhist Studies program where you take temporary monastic vows and live in a Burmese Buddhist monastery in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious pilgrimage town. I started learning Hindi there and grew attached to the steep learning curve and everything – linguistic, cultural, historical – on it. After college, I spent six years in India on a patchwork of scholarships and jobs, formally studying Hindi and Urdu, touring with street theater troupes and doing some film in Mumbai. Most of that time, though, I worked for Dalit and feminist organizations documenting caste discrimination and advocating for legal justice for survivors of anti-Dalit violence. Dalit, meaning ‘ground down’ or ‘oppressed,’ is the prevailing self-designation for that fifth of the population of South Asia – about 260 million people – popularly stigmatized as ‘untouchable.’
My friends and mentors in the Dalit movement, and what I learned working with them in ethnographic and survey-based advocacy studies in villages and towns in north India, heavily influenced what I later took up for my doctoral research. Meanwhile language and literature were there all along. You can’t study Urdu and not fall in love with Zauq and Mir; you can’t learn Hindi and fail to be moved by Renu, Premchand, and Omprakash Valmiki. Poets like Ravidas and Ghalib are for me perennial sources of intellectual sustenance.
What research are you currently conducting?
You may have heard about these ‘ghar wapsi,’ or ‘homecoming’ campaigns going on in India today, in which militant Hindu organizations seek to ‘reclaim’ Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians for Hinduism. These campaigns are premised on the idea that Dalits were in some sense Hindu in the first place, that they historically understood themselves and were perceived by others as belonging to the moral community of Hindus. This idea is deeply embedded in sociological commonsense, in the scholarly literature, and in the administrative logic with which the state of India carries out its affirmative action policies. But this idea, in fact, is barely a century old, and its backward projection onto the past does considerable violence to the historical self-representations of a whole range of religious communities before the twentieth century. The book I am writing now charts the history of this idea. I give evidence for what came before – particularly about a widespread autonomous Dalit religion centered on a prophet named Lal Beg – and then document how the colonial administration, Hindu nationalists of the 1920s, and Gandhi’s Congress party all played a role in forging a Hindu community that encompassed its erstwhile other. In the book I also examine what hides underneath this apparent majoritarian success: the underground survival of Lal Beg, an ongoing story of Dalit religious difference in the present.
I have two other projects on which I’m currently conducting research in north India. One deals with how caste informs the organization of space and the distribution of sensory matter in space – what soundscapes and smellscapes can teach us about how caste works. The other is a collaborative project with Masood Alam Falahi and other colleagues in India and the US. Each of us is doing ethnographic and historical research with Dalit Muslim communities, groups about whom almost nothing has been written yet whose historical experience, properly accounted for, stands to overturn aspects of the prevailing theories about both caste and religious belonging in South Asia.
Megamenu Social