Press release: Award for book on research in South Indian slums

No. 90 - 24.04.2018

Dr. Nathaniel Roberts from the University of Göttingen receives Bernard Cohn Prize 2018

(pug) Religious anthropologist Dr. Nathaniel Roberts from the University of Göttingen has received the Bernard Cohn Prize 2018. The Association for Asian Studies awarded him the prize for his book “To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and the Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum”. Roberts is currently a research fellow at Göttingen University’s Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS).

“To Be Cared For” offers a unique view into the conceptual and moral world of slum-bound Dalits – “untouchables” – in the South Indian city of Chennai. Focusing on the decision by many women to embrace locally specific forms of Pentecostal Christianity, Roberts challenges dominant anthropological understandings of religion as a matter of culture and identity, as well as Indian nationalist narratives of Christianity as a “foreign” ideology that disrupts local communities.

Original publication: Nathaniel Roberts. To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and the Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum. University of California Press 2016.

Contact:
Dr. Nathaniel Roberts
University of Göttingen
Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS)
Waldweg 26, 37073 Göttingen
Phone +49 551 4956-234
Email: roberts@mmg.mpg.de
Web: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/dr.+nathaniel+roberts/555899.html