Gastvortrag von Prof. Dr. Anindita Chakrabarti
IIT Kanpur, Indien
Many Lives of Gold in India:
Commodity, Communities,
and Economic Circuits
Datum: Montag, 3. Juni 2024
Beginn: 14:15 Uhr
Ort: Brühler Str. 7, 4. Etage, Raum 4.006
India, one of the largest importers of gold in the world, has the reputation of being an insatiable market for the yellow metal. Gold enjoys a double life as a sacramental object as well as the most fungible financial investment option. Its ubiquity in banks, temples and wedding ceremonies offers interesting material to think through sociological theories of consumption, wealth accumulation and kinship. Both gold jewellery manufacturing and gold trade have been community-based occupations in India. Even when the traditional boundaries of caste-based occupations have weakened in recent times, they have retained their community character. The lecture tracks and traces the changes in the gold sector in the post-independence period that was precipitated by a series of new laws to control gold consumption. The command economy led to what is known as ‘license raj’ and resulted in a complete overhaul of goldsmithing as a caste-based activity and buried it in the informal sector, deep into the heart of an ever-growing shadow economy. Trust, village networks and being self-organized (not unorganized) have been the hallmark of the sector since then. Finally, the lecture aims to ask and answer the question: what does gold consumption mean in India (and elsewhere) where modernization has failed to dent the sacramental, sartorial as well as financial supremacy of the ‘barbarous relic’ and the precious commodity inhabits different economic circuits in its many avatars?
Anindita Chakrabarti, professor of sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences IIT Kanpur, teaches and researches in the areas of sociology of religion, religion-based family law, and economic sociology with a focus on inheritance and entrepreneurship. Moreover, she has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies at Leipzig University since 2016 and has held visiting fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Society at Cologne, and the University of Munster. Currently she is a fellow at the India Gold Policy Centre at IIM Ahmedabad.