LK Mahapatra Memorial Lecture In Bhubaneswar Highlights Role Of Politics In Organisational Memory

Bhubaneswar: The role of local politics in organisational memory was highlighted at the third LK Mahapatra Memorial Lecture, jointly organised by the LK Mahapatra Memorial Trust and the PG Department of Anthropology of Utkal University at the Bakul Library in Bhubaneswar on Sunday.

Bhaskar Chakrabarti, an anthropologist and Dean, Academics and Professor of Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, spoke on “Good Memories, Bad Memories: How Political Organisations Remember and Forget” at the lecture organised to commemorate the birth anniversary of Prof Mahapatra.

Prof Chakrabarti explored how political organisations remember and forget, by empirically highlighting how and why village panchayats recollect or forget. He discussed the role of local politics in organisational memory, including memory loss in organisations. With the example of panchayats, he showed that as a consequence of “memory decay” and “failure to capture”, organisations involuntarily lose past knowledge and critical sources of expertise.

Prof K C Tripathy, eminent anthropologist of Odisha, presided the lecture and Prof Prasanna Patra of the Department of Anthropology, Utkal University introduced the speakers. Prof LK Mahapatra’s daughter Sheela welcomed the audience and his son Sujit Mahapatra, Founder of Bakul Foundation, spoke about Prof Mahapatra’s life and work.

The audience included eminent academics of the state from different disciplines, faculty, research scholars, and even undergraduate and graduate students of social sciences. The participants also explored the LKM Centre and Library, a reference library on social sciences, at 16 Satyanagar, the residence of Professor Mahapatra.

Prof Lakshman Kumar Mahapatra (1929-2020) was a world-renowned anthropologist and educationist from Odisha, who spent most of his career at Utkal University establishing the discipline of anthropology. He was also vice-chancellor of Utkal and Sambalpur universities and Director and later Chairman of the Nabakrushna Choudhury Centre for Development Studies.