Monday, February 23, 2009

3-5pm, CHAT Lounge

10th floor, Gladfelter

"Me-moirs, we-moirs, and the Art of Stories:
My Family and Other Saints"

Kirin Narayan
(University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Read excerpt here [pdf].

"Families can be so embarrassing. Imagine the agonies of an adolescent girl whose house has become infested with India-besotted hippies from all over the globe, whose sarcastic father stumbles around in an alcoholic haze and whose mother kneels at the feet of every swami she meets. And let us not forget grandma, who holds long conversations with her cow and once met a 1,000-year-old cobra with a ruby in its forehead and a mustache on its albino face. … Ms. Narayan, fed up with the family …, turned to her mother and warned, “When I grow up I’m going to write a book called ‘My Family and Other Saints’ and put you in it.” And so she did."

—William Grimes, The New York Times

Award-winning cultural anthropologist Kirin Narayan describes family stories as "so highly polished through multiple retellings, that handling them we glimpse our own reflections in their facets." Join her as she speaks about the art of memory and the craft of storytelling in writing My Family and Other Saints (Chicago, 2007), her incandescent memoir of a childhood in Bombay of the 1960s and 70s.

About the author: Kirin Narayan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her first book, an ethnography, Storytellers Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative as Hindu Religious Teaching (1989) won the first Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and was co-winner of the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for Folklore. She is the author of a novel, Love, Stars and All That (1994) and has collaborated on a literary and ethnographic folktale collection with Urmila Devi Sood, Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (1997). She is also co-editor of Creativity/Anthropology (1993) and editor of a new edition of Mary Frere’s classic 1868 folktale collection, Old Deccan Days (2002). Her research has been funded by fellowships from the NEH and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.