Shaping Futures through Nostalgia: Migration, Gender, and Nepali Dohori Song
Dr. Anna Stirr will talk about Nepali dohori songs, improvised duets often sung about love, and will question what this music can tell us about the relationships between intimacy, the Nepali nation-state, and transnational migration and circulation.
Dr. Anna Stirr will talk about Nepali dohori songs, improvised duets often sung about love, and will question what this music can tell us about the relationships between intimacy, the Nepali nation-state, and transnational migration and circulation. Dr. Stirr will examine how these relationships change in a postmodern context defined by armed conflict, a weak state, increasing migration, and rapid media circulation, concentrating on the dialogic interactions that dohori songs encourage across space, time, and social divides. Identifying nostalgia as a central theme in dohori songs, this talk explores its relationship with gender inequality and individual performers' hopes for the future.
Dr. Anna Stirr is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Asian Modernities and Traditions (AMT) Research Group at Leiden University and will join the Asian Studies Program at the University of Hawaii in January 2012. She has been research associate at Oxford University and has previously taught at Columbia University and Kathmandu University. Dr. Stirr's approach to the study of music is grounded in ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Her research focuses on music in Nepal and the surrounding areas of the Himalayan region and South Asia, as well as Nepali migrant communities abroad.