Research seminar with Meghan Rose Donnelly: "‘Ready to be sent wherever’: The Mobile Lives of Indonesian Catholic Nuns"

Abstract:

This paper discusses the mobility of nuns’ lives, placing it in a wider context of Indonesian migration and the global Catholic Church. Nuns are frequently reassigned to new convents, swapping one set of sisters for another. A characterizing feature of nuns’ lives, the opportunity to move is a common motive for entering the convent in the first place. In lively storytelling sessions and festive performances, sisters reenact their lives as a series of moves, reinforcing their commitment to be ‘ready to be sent wherever’. But what makes nuns’ mobility meaningful, I argue, is the way it affects relationships: interrupting collective life, attenuating friendships and lending the deepest intimacies an air—and urgency—of impermanence.

Bio:

Meghan Rose Donnelly is an anthropologist of community and religious experience working closely with Indonesian Catholic nuns. Her research combines long-term participant-observation with experimental performance ethnography to examine the transformative relationship between self and community that convent life exemplifies. She is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and a founder of the anthropological theatre company Tiny Human Dramas.