Power and Its Ideology

Duke University's three-year exploration of critical issues in world civilizations opened a semester-long inquiry into social hierarchy and equality this week with a lecture by feminist philosopher Sandra Harding.

"We will spend the spring semester looking at the disproportionate power relations that hierarchy and equality embody and project at several levels," said Bruce Lawrence, chairman of the Duke religion department and director of the Pivotal Ideas of World Civilizations program. "But we're also trying to account for perspectives that do not reflexively exalt the latter while debunking the former."

Harding, a professor of education and women's studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, spoke Feb. 3 in the Gross Chemical Laboratory building. She is the author or editor of 10 books and special journal issues ‚ including "Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialism, Feminisms and Epistemologies" and "Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking From Women's Lives" ‚ and has served as a consultant to several United Nations organizations, including the Pan American Health Organization, the U.N. Development Fund for Women and the U.N. Commission on Science and Technology for Development.

Launched in the fall of 1999 and funded with a $229,400 grant from the E.L. Wiegand Foundation of Reno, Nev., the Pivotal Ideas of World Civilizations program's stated goal is "to expose the Duke community to the ideas and traditions that shape the world's major belief systems." Distinguished speakers and international performing groups visit campus each semester to reflect upon a particular theme and generate exploration from multiple perspectives.

Next up this spring is the internationally acclaimed South African music group Ladysmith Black Mambazo on March 1, followed by sociologist and religious anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown with voodoo priestess Mama Lola on March 22 and Ashis Nandy, a political psychologist, social theorist and futurist on April 22.

The lectures are free and open to the public.

Ladysmith Black Mambazo has come to be regarded as South Africa's cultural emissaries at home and around the world. Founded in 1964 by factory worker Joseph Shabalala, the group blends the traditional "Isicathamiya" music developed by South African mine workers with Western pop music stylings. The number one selling group in Africa, Ladysmith Black Mambazo has sold more than 3 million copies of its more than 30 albums.

The group shot to international prominence as a result of its collaboration with Paul Simon on his "Graceland" album, which has sold more than 10 million copies. Their first U.S. release, "Shaka Zulu," won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Recording in 1987. In the past decade, Ladysmith Black Mambazo has won critical acclaim while touring internationally and recording with artists ranging from Stevie Wonder to Dolly Parton.

Karen McCarthy Brown and Mama Lola drew on their decade-long friendship to produce a critically acclaimed 1991 book, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society), which earned Brown the Victor Turner Award from the Society of Humanistic Anthropology, Best First Book in the History of Religion and the Bela Kornitzer Prize from Drew University, where she teaches. The book shattered the modern stereotypes about voodoo by offering an intimate portrait of the religious practice in everyday life.

Brown, the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation, is also the author of Tracing the Spirit: Ethnographic Essays on Haitian Art and numerous articles and book reviews. Her work displays her interest in exploring the role of women in religious practices and the related themes of family and of religion and social change.

Mama Lola, born Alourdes Champagne Lovinski more than 60 years ago in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is the daughter of a well-known voodoo priestess. She now works full time, out of her home in Brooklyn, as a healer and spiritual leader of the Haitian community.

Ashis Nandy is a senior fellow and former director of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies and chairman of the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures in Delhi. Nandy is active in movements for peace, alternative sciences and technologies and cultural survival. He is a member of the executive councils of the World Future Studies Federation, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the International Network for Cultural Alternatives to Development and the People's Union for Civil Liberties. Nandy has been a Regent's Fellow at UCLA; a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Wilson Center, Washington; a Charles Wallace Fellow at the University of Hull; a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities at the University of Edinburgh; and the first UNESCO professor at the Center for European Studies at the University of Trier.

A prolific writer, Nandy's books include: Alternative Sciences, At The Edge of Psychology, The Intimate Enemy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias and The Savage Freud. His is also co-author of The Blinded Eye: Five Hundred Years of Christopher Columbus. The Oxford University Press is publishing an omnibus edition of his works, with the first two installments ‚ Exiled at Home and Return from Exile ‚ already in print.