Moors and Muslims: Sri Lanka-Tamilnadu Muslim connections

Moors and Muslims: Sri Lanka-Tamilnadu Muslim connections

Penang and the Indian Ocean series:

Moors and Muslims: Sri Lanka-Tamilnadu Muslim connections

Speaker: Dennis McGilveray, Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado

Date/Time: Thursday 6 March, 2014 at 8pm

Venue: Penang Heritage Trust office

26 Lebuh Gereja

Please RSVP by Wednesday 5 March by phone or email.

Dennis McGilvray (Ph.D. 1974, University of Chicago)

My ethnographic interests are in South Asia, with a research focus on the Tamils and Muslims of south India and Sri Lanka. My book, Crucible of Conflict (Duke 2008), analyzes matrilineal Hindu and Muslim kinship, caste structure, religious ritual, and ethnic identities in the Tamil-speaking region of eastern Sri Lanka, an area that has been deeply affected by the island’s civil war. I have also co-edited (with Michele Gamburd) a volume of essays from a multidisciplinary NSF project entitled Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions (Routledge 2010). Currently I am exploring transnational Sufism and Muslim saints’ shrines in Sri Lanka and southern India, as well as conducting fieldwork on matrilocal marriage and dowry patterns among Tamils and Muslims in post-conflict Sri Lanka. A published photographer (Symbolic Heat, Mapin 1998), I am also interested in visual anthropology and alternative modes of cultural representation. At CU Boulder I teach a lower division course on Tamil culture; upper division courses on Symbolic Anthropology, Foundations of Theory, and South Asian ethnography; and a graduate seminar on Ethnography and Cultural Theory.

 

Selected Publications:

 

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