In the context of continuing violence in social spaces, there is a need to explore and expand the existing methodology of social sciences, particularly of sociology and social anthropology, in order to address the silences and gaps that constitute the traces of the field, according to Dr. Soibam Haripriya, a poet and the Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University, Belgium. Dr. Haripriya was speaking at the Web-enunciated Special Lecture on Poetry, Death, and Making of the Social, organised by the Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension (IUCSSRE), Mahatma Gandhi University. Categories like “life” and “living” seem to be continuously shadowed by unpredictability, arbitrariness and risk. As Achille Mbembe observed, “these zones begin to resemble ‘deathworlds’ ” (Baishya 2019:2). Drawing from this, ‘Deathworld’ is a term Dr. Haripriya used to describe her field-sites located in the northeast, because of the construction of the northeast as an anomalous space of violence engendered through law and military-administrative nexus which continues to unfold. Violent death is already enshrined in the law for a group of people that inhabit what is called a ‘disturbed area’ in the AFSPA. Dr. Haripriya said that in this space “it is not possible to sequester violence, the long years of militarization has ensured a space where every aspect of life is marked by violence, where one sees more and more stakeholders interested in a regime of violence. She said this is “propelled by a desire at ‘partial understanding’ of this space through poetry and ways that seek intertextuality between poetry and field as text.”
According to Dr. Haripriya, “the recovery of poetry in the context of doing fieldwork in violent sites unsettles predominant ways of seeing, thereby offering new ways of reading the social.” She said she used “poetry as a means to deliberate death especially when acts of dying are an everyday possibility.” “As opposed to death as an end of life event, many works from violent sites discuss the fecundity of death as ways of renewed mobilization towards resistance.” Dr. Haripriya pointed out that poetry is “a multivocal space where the poem, reader-audience and the field bring in narratives confined to ethical demands of confidentiality. The visceral fact of violence and death as well as the emotive lives lived in such a site,” she argued, “is best captured in genres which is not burdened by demands and expectation of factual reportage and/or witnessing.”
K.M. Seethi, Director, IUCSSRE, welcomed the session and Dr. Mathew Varghese, Adjunct Faculty, IUCSSRE coordinated the programme.
Dr. Soibam Haripriya served as a Fellow at Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS), Shimla and had taught at the Centre for Sociology and Social Anthropology, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Guwahati campus and Gender Studies Programme, Ambedkar University, New Delhi.
