Cool Class: Beyond Bollywood鈥擥ender, Performance, and Popular Culture in South Asia
Taught by Associate Professor of Anthropology Amanda Weidman, offered Fall 2019.
What's Cool?: I鈥檝e worked as an anthropologist in South India since the early 1990s. My interest in the region began with studying South Indian classical music. I became interested in the power of performance and the ways that boundaries are drawn between 鈥渉igh鈥 and 鈥減opular鈥 culture. I also watched lots of Tamil movies, which are made in 鈥淜ollywood,鈥 one of several regional film industries in India that make movies in different Indian languages, beyond the Bollywood industry that many have heard of. For the last 10 years, I鈥檝e been working on a project on the singers who record their voices for the song-and-dance sequences in these films, and who, though they don鈥檛 appear on screen, become celebrities in their own right.
Anthropology doesn鈥檛 make value-based distinctions between 鈥渉igh鈥 and 鈥渓ow鈥 culture鈥攖o an anthropologist, all forms of expressive culture are worth studying for what they can tell us about a society鈥檚 power structure and its aspirations. I hope students will come away from this course with tools for approaching performance and popular culture鈥攏ot only in South Asia, but at home鈥攁s more than just entertainment.
Course Description: Though India鈥檚 鈥淏ollywood鈥 film industry may be the most widely known, the countries of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka) have produced varied and vibrant forms of popular culture, including cinema, theatrical and other forms of performance, music and visual culture. Approaching cinema and other audio-visual materials from an anthropological perspective, this course will examine performance and popular culture as crucial sites for the construction and negotiation of gendered identities and gender ideologies in these different national and regional contexts. The issues we will explore include: questions of agency, constraint, and identity in performance; the role of mass mediation in creating new masculinities and femininities; changing forms of celebrity and fandom; and the relationship between popular culture and larger national and sociopolitical identities.
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