The Mittal Institute welcomes you to a presentation by Anu K Antony, Raghunathan Family Fellow 2023-24, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, moderated by Francis X. Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School
This seminar talk will elaborate on the everyday life and vocation of Syrian Catholic nuns from Kerala and explicate how ‘spiritual labor’ forms an integral part of a Catholic nun’s subjectivity. Traversing through the archival and ethnographic narratives of a nun’s calling, prayer, relationship with God, religious work, monastic socialities and freedom, the presentation is an attempt to lay out the argument that ‘spiritual labor’ offers a significant framework to re-imagine the notion of labor, through and beyond the concepts of alienation, surplus value, and commodification in the context of a late capitalist society. It will explore how a Christian call, truth, freedom, and discernment contribute towards both reinforcing and critiquing capitalistic models of labor.
Anu K Antony is a researcher whose work focuses primarily on the themes of subjectivity, women’s religious life and labor, everyday religiosity, and post-secular discourses in the context of Indian Christianity. She worked as a visiting faculty at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Tuljapur, India, from September 2022 to April 2023. She recently defended her Ph.D. thesis titled ‘Constituting a Religious Subject: Calling, Prayer and Spiritual Labour among the Syrian Catholic Nuns of Kerala’ from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Prior to her Ph.D., she completed an MPhil dissertation titled ‘Constituting Moralities: The Study of a Catholic Convent School in Kerala’ from the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad, India. Her research combines archival and ethnographic methods to bring out the significance of Catholic monasticism, its institutions, and the gendered labor associated with it, in understanding various aspects pertinent to contemporary Kerala society as well as their history. She has presented papers at several national and international conferences and has published in international peer-reviewed journals.
