The talk will be based on a chapter of Professor Ram's recently published book Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern (University of Hawai'i Press 2013). The book uses spirit possession to illuminate ordinary experiences and relationships, but also to uncover fundamental instabilities that continue to haunt modern formulations of gender, human agency, and political emancipation that underlie the social improvement projects such as family planning, development and emancipation that circulate in Tamil Nadu (south India). The paper will concentrate on developing alternative conceptions of justice and sovereignty based on the complaints women and men bring to the makeshift 'courts' of the goddess brought to presence by spirit mediums.

Associate Professor Kalpana Ram is a senior lecturer in Anthropology, Macquarie University (Sydney) and Director of the India Research Centre at Macquarie. Her latest book is Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern, (University of Hawai'i Press, 2013). She is currently working on an edited volume on phenomenology and anthropology. Her first book Mukkuvar Women (1991) explored gender, capitalist transformation and popular religion in a Catholic fishing community in south India. As a founding member of the ANU's Gender Relations Centre, she co-edited two books with Margaret Jolly, Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Borders of Being: Citizenship, Sexuality and Reproduction in Asia and the Pacific (University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 2001). She also publishes widely on feminist theory, dance, postcolonialism and Indian diaspora.  She teaches courses on India, phenomenology, and social movements.