Frank Korom, "‘We Speak, But No One Listens': The Problems and Prospects of Local/Global Flows in a Bengali Village"

Frank Korom, Professor of Religion and Anthropology This informal, illustrated talk will focus on recent developments in the "village of painters" that I have been studying since 2001. The focus will be on recent developments that have occurred since my first book about the Patua scroll painters came out in 2006. Since then, a number of global interventions of significant proportions have affected the village on a variety of levels, not least of which have been economic in nature. Yet newfound wealth has also brought about tensions within the community. I will conclude that the pleasures of modernity are equally fraught with the dangers of social fragmentation due to ongoing competition in the marketplace of culture.