In an era of global political passions, many have wondered whether some sort of natural affinity exists between political style and substance. Does liberal democracy speak the language of rationality and sincerity while political emotion, imagery, and embodiment properly belong to authoritarianism? Taking an ethnographic approach to the relationship between political form and political content, Lisa Björkman’s book, Drama of Democracy, explores the material substance of representations (things like heady crowds and rousing images) together with language-based forms of political communication, such as public oration and community meetings. Drawing on a decade of research in the city of Mumbai, Björkman will discuss how embodied performance is the very site and substance of representation and demonstrates how Mumbaikars evaluate performative bids to represent. The ethnographic accounts demonstrate the extraordinary fluency in this evaluative work in Mumbai, where people from all walks of life are remarkably astute at navigating and assessing political signs and representations, endlessly discussing and debating possible meanings of the city’s dense material-semiotic ecologies—whether words or images, cash or crowds, flyers or flowers. In this presentation she will discuss one of the book’s ethnographic chapters, which attends to the relationship between in-the-flesh mass political gatherings, and the images of those same crowd events that are produced and circulated, especially over social media using mobile phone cameras. Rather than counterposing the real and the virtual, the ethnography of kaaghaz (paper) attends to the broad spectrum of materials comprising the infrastructure of representation—paper placards, city streets, proximate bodies, mobile phones, digital images—yielding insight into the recursive relations between the material infrastructures and affects of embodied crowds and those of their circulating image-representations.

To attend in person, register on Ticket Tailor.

Speaker

Lisa Björkman

Lisa Björkman is a political ethnographer and urban anthropologist. An Associate Professor at the University of Louisville, she is currently based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Lisa is author of Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (University of Minnesota Press,2025), Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press 2015); Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai’s Other World-Class Histories (Columbia University Press 2020); Bombay Brokers (Duke University Press 2021), and Napoli Navigators Berghahn 2027).