Nishaant Choksi

The interaction of language and ritual continues to be a central concern in understanding how the cultures of the world constitute their daily worlds of meaning-making performances. In areas marked by ethnolinguistic diversity, the networks through which linguistic resources are mobilized to make ritual efficacious and affective often cross cultural boundaries. They are also deeply embedded in natural ecologies that are experiencing rapid transformation. In this workshop, we will bring together a multidisciplinary team of researchers working in India and Laos on visual semiotics, linguistic anthropology, and musicology. With varying interests in language and ritual performance, the team members share a strong commitment to theoretical explanations that are solidly rooted in ethnography. These intellectual strengths are reflected in the format of this mobile workshop, which will bring the researchers together in day orientation and then move to a fieldwork setting to exchange and collaborate with local communities in Guwahati, northeast India. The collaboration will culminate in special issue of a top-tier anthropology/linguistics journal featuring the individual research outputs of the participants, as well as a synthesis of methodological and theoretical concerns that draws on the novel insights generated in this workshop process.