Harvard Professor to Lecture at Williams
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Professor Richard Wolf of Harvard University will give the lecture "Hearing What You Want to Hear: Perspectival Discrimination in the Ritual and Drumming of Muharram in South Asia” on Monday, March 15, at 4:15 p.m. in Bernhard Music Center Room 30 on the Williams College campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.Wolf's lecture will address the role of a perceiver's attitude in making sense of any object, and how communities project aspects of their own religious and cultural values into practices that they might share with other communities. Wolf specifically will look at ritual practices of Asian Shiah Muslims, Sunnis and Hindus, particularly the practice of Muharram drumming.
Wolf completed a Master of Music thesis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied social-cultural as well as technical components of Karnatak "style" (bani) (1989). For his PhD dissertation, Wolf conducted fieldwork for two years on the music and ritual of one of the tribal minority populations of the Nilgiri Hills, the Kotas (1997).
In November 1996, the final draft of Wolf's PhD thesis was still in the mail when he boarded a plane with his wife to commence two-and-a-half years of new field research. This work in north India and Pakistan centered on drumming, "recitation," and music in public Islamic contexts. Wolf returned from south Asia to take up a position at Harvard in 1999 and has remained there ever since.
The lecture is sponsored by Class of 1960 Scholars Fund, which was established at their 25th Reunion; the fund brings eminent researchers from other colleges and universities to campus to give colloquia.
