Arnab Sen's Friends

Arnab Sen's Groups

At 9:12pm on September 30, 2011, Nold Egenter said…: could you please send me your surface mail address. I would like to send you the book about my study of 100 villages in Japan with the suggestion to do something similar in India. Warm regards, Nold Egenter (below: sacred pillar of our Maharashtra study)

At 3:55pm on July 19, 2011, Nold Egenter said…: Dear Arnab Sen,
• Today religion in India interpretes deities in general as history-based, as mythical figures, mostly presented in anthropomorphous form. Travelling in India in rural areas I discovered that there is another evidently earlier type still used in local villages, deities in the centre of the cults being formed quite differently:
--as some sort of smaller or larger pillar decorated with twigs, flowers, ears and the like
--as smaller or larger huts, later set on fire
--as a cluster of rice plants combined with other elements representing Lakshmi as 'fertility of rice deity'
• These earlier types of deities are set up either in front of temples or they are put up in rice fields of some family in the village or related to the village sanctuary of the whole village. The Lakshmi deity shown in the video was covered up with cloth at the end of the ceremony and carried to the village where various groups had produced gates with sacrifices for the deity in procession. A beautiful cult event.
• I will put two or three videos of these festivals seen in India into YouTube.
• If you manage to find such local rural cults in some regions of India and manage to produce some photos and a short report we could discuss the support of such an expedition.
Regards, Nold Egenter

At 9:34am on October 8, 2009, Arnab Sen said…: I have a wide canvas of interests in anthropology including homeland, imagined homeland and migration. My fieldwork experience is equally varied. I have worked on construction / contestation of gender and geographical identity through fashion in a post industrial city in India. I have worked with a hunter gatherer community on understanding their belief system, spatiality and conception of homeland. I have also worked on communication technology, migration and identity construction in urban India. My theoretical underpinnings are typically either post structural or interpretive. I work now as a brand planner with McCann Erickson in India - on brands like Coke and HP Compaq. I have an abiding interest in homelands of indigenous peoples and am involved in an advocacy network of indigenous peoples and their civil society organizations in Central India. A couple of years down the line I see this as a full time engagement and I hope to bring to the table my interests in anthropology and understanding of global consumer brands in building a fair trade business / brand for this advocacy network.