Living Fossils
One of the most popular jokes among anthropologists is how often our work is mistaken for palaeontology. Almost every one of my colleagues and even a few of…
Tag: India
Ep. #15 Designing agency: Vijayendra Rao talks development, anthropology, and making social change
Vijayendra Rao, the lead economist at the World Bank in the research department, talks to our own Ian Pollock about the role that anthropology and ethnography could play in helping…
De-centrifuedalised or tropicalization: Marx outside the Euro-American Circuits
So, a bit bemused at the appearance of various Marx readers or ‘companions’ filled with US and UK based scholars, mostly, I thought it worth pointing to a…
Ep. #14 Thesis writing, picturing cults, Muslims with caste, & fieldwork boredom: this month on TFS
Ian (1:25) starts us off by asking, just how well-written does a thesis need to be? “As anthropologists, basically what we do is write… whether it’s writing your field notes,…
The Rumour of Calcutta – digital book
22 years ago my first book was typeset and laid out in the days before electronics – well, an electric typesetting machine was plugged into a wall, but…
Projit Bihari Mukharji’s Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences by Marshall Kramer
Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences Projit Bihari Mukharji University of Chicago Press, 2016. 376 pages. In a sequel to his 2009 Nationalizing the Body,…
Anthrocasts: When communities speak, listen and learn
Online ethnography, where researchers may never share a physical space with the participants in their research, is finding its methodological feet. Combine that with an analysis of these…
Restored 18th century Danish tavern to be inaugurated today
[JH comment: now if you were plying the illicit opium trade on behalf of dodgy East India Company officials, you’d also need to stop by the Tavern and…
Book Review: Children and Media in India: Narratives of Class, Agency and Social Change by Shakuntala Banaji
In Children and Media in India: Narratives of Class, Agency and Social Change, Shakuntala Banaji draws on extensive fieldwork research to offer a rich and textured account of the place of…
DragNet: January 16 – January 31, 2018
Image from projects.bettergov.org DragNet is back, with a recap of a number articles that came up last month in our twitter feed. In World News, we have a…
Ep. #7 The knowledge we value: Dipesh Chakrabarty talks the contentious politics of knowledge production
“Doing history ideally is like doing anthropology of people who are gone, except that you don’t have native informants, you only have these written fragmentary sources. But the…
Living and F*cking with Acronyms: A response to Dennis Altman’s call to rethink LGBTI
Last week Australian academic Dennis Altman published a provocative piece in The Conversation, suggesting that it was time to re think the label LGBTI. In the place of…
On Madhava Prasad
an overdue appreciation. Read the rest of the review here, or below: In Cine-Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India, film studies becomes politics, but also society,…
Ep. #5 Stunted thinking: Annie McCarthy talks slum children, NGOs, and stunting in Delhi
In Ep. #5, Stunted thinking, Annie McCarthy talks slum children, NGOs, and stunting in Delhi, India.
#3 The flies that bind: Assa Doron talks waste in India
In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Assa Doron talks about India’s waste, both liquid and solid, and the physical and institutional infrastructures that handle it–or fail to, plus the…
Danish Tavern Serampore
Danish tavern decked up to start second innings in Serampore Ajanta Chakraborty| TNN | Nov 21, 2017, 04:53 IST KOLKATA: The double-storey Denmark Tavern, which was in a shambles till a…
Nithya Natarajan: Behind the Indian Boom
“Behind the Indian Boom: Inequality and Resistance at the Heart of Economic Growth” is an exhibition curated by Alpa Shah and Simon Chambers, located in the Brunei Gallery…
Do you remember when Australia did this for CHOGM? So its not just a ‘commonwealth’ thing.
Urban beauty. I dunno if I am more disgusted by this event with Ivanka or the WP’ article’s failure to do proper comparative memory work – since I…
Mr Ram Nath Kovind, President of India, There are many in your jails, but some I have invited for talks at University of London several times. This requires your immediate action sir. Thank-you.
LETTER FROM PROF G N SAIBABA FROM INDIAN PRISON Letter from Sai written on 17th October received on 25th October 2017 Dear Vasantha I am frightened to think of coming…
Max Weber on India Key References
At the bottom of one of my shelves, unopened since undergraduate honours days, I have Max Weber’s book on Religions of India. got to wondering recently how he…
Johan Fischer: Veg or non-veg? On fieldwork and food in India
Reporting from an ongoing fieldwork in Hyderabad, India, the central topic of this piece is the ways in which the vegetarian and the nonvegetarian are understood, practiced, and…
When ‘White Privilege’ Becomes Uncomfortably Familiar
Author: Nonie Tuxen, PhD candidate in the Sociology of Education at the ANU. Nonie’s research explores youth engagement with international education and how class status is correspondingly (re)produce…
Review: The Darjeeling Distinction
By Peter Luetchford ** Reprinted from Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies Sarah Besky’s informative monograph on tea plantations in the northern Indian district of Darjeeling fills…
Indian Cinema
Reminder to self. Go back and watch more of the wonderful archive that is https://indiancine.ma Such a bunch of tollylicious fun.Filed under: elephant, film, India