Abstract
In this essay, I partake in a self-inventory to textually narrate for you as well as myself the relationship, as I experience it, between stories and theories in my intellectual life. My autobiographical reflections span the period of the 1947 partition in Indian history, as experienced by my family, to my own journey as a scholar. I tell you, in personal narrative and essay form, a family story of resistance to “refugee narratives” as a story of inherited displacements that interrogates the ontology of my intellectual leanings, by showing the various limens (see Turner’s The Anthropology of Performance) that I continue to encounter in my struggles to story. In doing so, I articulate my resistance to theory, my leanings toward storying, and the ongoing struggle to reside in the liminal space between stories and theories. I show myself caught in intellectual limens. While I do not propose any way out of them, I believe that explorations such as these are necessary for scholars to reflect, interrogate, and em body to honestly pursue their intellectual endeavors.
Recommended Citation
Chawla, Devika
(2007)
"Between Stories and Theories: Embodiments, Disembodiments, and Other Struggles,"
Storytelling, Self, Society: Vol. 3:
Iss.
1, Article 2.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/storytelling/vol3/iss1/2