Individual and Community in Contemporary German Villages

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences</strong> CSSS Colloquium <strong>Sadhana Naithani</strong> (Professor, Centre for German Studies, SLL&amp;CS, Jawaharlal Nehru University) Will be presenting a paper on <strong>Individual and Community in Contemporary German Villages</strong> Date :&nbsp;<strong>September 29th, 2016</strong> <strong>Abstract:</strong>&nbsp;Religion and agriculture do not play the binding role in the community life of villages in contemporary Germany. Then, what is it that makes community life possible? I seek the answer to this question in the build-up on my talk in CSSS in the last semester. I explore the individual and social life of people through personal narratives. In my presentation I talk about the theoretical challenges in field-work and how I tried to resolve those issues, and show the film I have made from my documentation in a set of villages in South Lower Saxony, Germany. The film is titled Village Tales 2: The Volunteers (55 minutes/HD/2016). <strong>Bio:&nbsp;</strong>Sadhana Naithani is Professor at the Centre of German Studies, JNU. She is the author of In Quest of Indian Folktales (Indiana University Press, 2006), The Story Time of the British Empire. Colonial and Postcolonial Folkloristics (University Press of Mississippi, 2010) and Folklore Theory In Postwar Germany (University Press of Mississippi, 2014). Her latest publication is a short novel: ELEPHANTINE, published in the UK by Red Squirrel Press, 2016. Sadhana Naithani's research interests relate to fields of folklore, culture, history, anthropology and sociology.