Guest Talk by Lisa Björkman “Drama of Democracy: Enacting Representation in Mumbai”

In an era of global political passions, many have wondered whether some sort of natural affinity exists between political style and substance. Does liberal democracy speak the language of rationality and sincerity while political emotion, imagery, and embodiment properly belong to authoritarianism? 

Taking an ethnographic approach to the relationship between political form and political content, this talk by Lisa Björkman on the new Drama of Democracy explores the material substance of representations (things like heady crowds and rousing images) together with language-based forms of political communication, such as public oration and community meetings. Drawing on a decade of research in the city of Mumbai, Björkman will discuss how embodied performance is the very site and substance of representation and demonstrates how Mumbaikars evaluate performative bids to represent.​

Lisa Björkman is a political ethnographer and urban anthropologist. As Associate Professor at the University of Louisville, she is currently based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Björkman is the author of Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (University of Minnesota Press, 2025); Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press 2015); Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai’s Other World-Class Histories (Columbia University Press, 2020); Bombay Brokers (Duke University Press, 2021).
A recording of the talk will afterwards be made available on the Department's Website.