Being Human; Being Tamil: Personhood, Agency and Identity

Dates: May 15-17, 2008
Location: University of Toronto
Call for Submissions Deadline: August 31, 2007
Website: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~tamils/tsc2008/index.html

The objective of this conference, in response to questions posed by scholarly critiques of universal conceptions of the human and unified notions of identity, is to invite papers that investigate how “human” or "personhood" have been imagined, conceptualized, practiced and performed throughout history within the Tamil regions and traditions. What is the intellectual, cultural, and literary history of Tamil understandings of the human person? Was there ever a conception of a universal human being? What are the sources for imagining the self and the practices of its construction and expression? What are the continuities and transformations in Tamil conceptions of the self, particularly in defining men and women and caste identities?