What Matters to Me and Why

Purnima Mankekar, Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology, will be the featured speaker at this lecture series encouraging reflection within the Stanford community on matters of personal values, beliefs, and motivations. All are welcome. Bring your lunch if you like.

Purnima Mankekar joined the Anthropology Department's program in Comparative Cultural Studies in the Spring of 1994. Her dissertation, entitled "Reconstituting 'Indian Womanhood': An Ethnography of Television Viewers in a North Indian City," explores the affective bases of nationalism and the ways in which the politics of gender, sexuality, family, and ethnicity shape people's ideas about the nation and themselves as citizens. Based on research among viewers whose interpretations of television serials is contextually analyzed, Professor Mankekar's work has stimulated some of the most exciting new questions about popular culture and nationalism emerging out of British cultural studies.