Bhrigupati Singh, Lecture on 'Can a Neighbourhood Fall Sick?'

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies invites you to a Critical Humanities event Can a Neighbourhood Fall Sick? Opioid Addiction, Collective Violence and Currents of Death in Contemporary India Lecture by Bhrigupati Singh Respondents: Shalini Singh and Alex Nading Moderator: Prathama Banerjee Friday, 29 January 2021, 9 pm India Time The discussion was held on Zoom Link: http://bit.ly/3bWmhLJ Meeting ID: 980 7215 5959 Passcode: csdsdelhi This lecture examines concepts of psychic life that anthropology and social theory might offer, in conversation with psychiatry. Focussing on neighbourhoods as a unit of analysis, it places India in the context of an emerging global opioid epidemic, and examines sharply varying patterns of addiction and levels of collective violence across demographically similar neighbourhoods in South Asia. As such, it suggests how anthropology might study symptoms and offer particular kinds of diagnosis, in ways that matter for understanding trajectories of illness, addiction, violence and psychic life. Bhrigupati Singh is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Ashoka University, and Visiting Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Brown University. He works at the intersection of religion, mental health, media, and popular culture. He is the author of Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India, Chicago University Press, 2015. Shalini Singh is Assistant Professor at National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre, AIIMS, New Delhi. Alex Nading is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University, US. Prathama Banerjee is Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.