For each episode of 5 Objects, we ask a guest to choose five pieces or items that have influenced their intellectual life and work. These can be books, art, music, poetry, photographs, performance, a person, an event, or an experience. The choices of objects have ranged from books by Edward Said, Steve Biko, and Assata Shakur, music from Notorious BIG, art by Ermias Ekube, the radio, and becoming a refugee after the Somali war. The choices then become the basis of a free-flowing conversation that discusses our guest’s life, their personal, political, and intellectual journeys and histories.
For this episode, Suchitra Vijayan talks to Dr. Anand Pandian, a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Here are his five objects:
1. The Burma Evacuee Identity Certificate that my grandfather was given when he returned to India as a refugee from Burma during the Second World War
2. The Left Hand of Darknessby Ursula K. Le Guin
3. The voice of Karupayi Amma, a landless laborer I worked with closely during my dissertation research in the Cumbum Valley of south India
4. Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations
5. An orange plastic toy paratrooper I found on a rocky shoreline in northern Chile during a weeklong expedition to study ocean plastic debris in 2017
