Isabelle Clark-Decès
Professor
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1995
interests
Hindu cosmology, ritual and symbolic action, theoretical issues in ethnography, South Indian kinship, contemporary India
short bio
Isabelle Clark-Decès has conducted fieldwork in the state of Tamilnadu in South India. Her research focuses on the transformative dynamics of ritual processes and on the ways in which kinship organization (particularly marriage) shapes collective sensibilities and people's personal subjectivities (their inner feelings, desires, anxieties and intentions). She is the author of Religion Against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals (as Isabelle Nabokov); No One Cries for the Dead: Tamil Dirges, Rowdy Songs and Graveyard Petitions; and The Encounter Never Ends: a Return to the Field of Tamil Rituals. She is currently writing a new manuscript on the changing configurations of Tamil marriage with particular reference to Louis Dumont's alliance theory. She teaches courses on India, ritual and myth, religion and magic, and on the reading of ethnographic texts. She also directs the Princeton Program in South Asian Studies.
