Thiranagama draws upon Lacan’s notion of the “extimate,” understood as the other in the heart of the intimate, first to describe how caste and ethnicity contour the dense social public life of Sri Lankan Tamils and Muslims in post war Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and secondly the relationship of Dalit communities as “the downtrodden” towards the Communist Party (Marxist) in Palakkad, Kerala. Moving from the presence of the foreign substance, or the presence of the external order that imposes its exteriority from within, instead, Thiranagama tries to understand from those who are placed as extimate, what it means to have at the heart of your family networks, neighborhood, work, and life story, that which brings you close only to hold you apart or rather, hold you in place. The talk proposes to do this by drawing upon an expansive understanding of caste and historical universes across South India and Sri Lanka which emphasizes not the continuity of cultural complexes, but their dynamic creation.

The 2025 Chicago Tamil Forum is organized by Eléonore Rimbault (Harper-Schmidt Fellow, Collegiate Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago). Learn more here

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