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Research Centre for Religious Studies Research Centres Institute of Indian Studies Research History and Theory of the Anthropology of India

Associate Fellows

Research Cluster: Adivasi / Anthropology of India
Research Cluster: Adivasi / Anthropology of India

Christopher Gregory is Reader in Anthropology at the Australian National University. He has been conducting fieldwork on the North Bastar plateau of Chhattisgarh off and on since 1982. He carried out 13 months fieldwork in 1982-83 and has made 14 short trips back since then, the most recent being in April-May 2013. His initial work focussed on the periodic marketing system and the role of kinship and caste in the economic differentiation of merchants, many of whom are immigrants from other parts of India ( Savage Money 1997). His subsequent work has focussed on the Halbi-speaking indigenous people of Bastar. He has published articles on their kinship system and is writing up research on the rice harvest rituals. Lakshmi is the Goddess of Rice in Bastar and women called gurumai sing long oral epics (of around 30,000 lines) about her that are ritually enacted during the harvest season. Contact: chris.gregory anu.edu.au

Research Cluster: Adivasi / Anthropology of India
Research Cluster: Adivasi / Anthropology of India

Frank Heidemann is professor for social and cultural anthropology at the University of Munich since 1997. For his doctoral thesis on Indo-Sri Lankan Labour Migration and the Repatriation of up-country Tamils from Sri Lanka he spent two years in Tamil Nadu conducting research in archives and in villages. After working with these up-rooted landless labourers he focussed his post-doctoral research on the Nilgiri region. His habilitation was on the religious and political system of the Badaga, the farming community in this region. Since 2009 Heidemann is working on the Andaman Islands and conducted a conference on “Manifestations of History” in 2013. His fields of interest include the anthropology of religion, politics, migration, aesthetics as well as history and theory of anthropology. Among his books: Kanganies in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. Tamil Recruiter-cum-Foremen in the nineteenth and twentieth century (Anacon 1992); Akka Bakka – Religion, Politik und duale Souveränität der Badaga in den Nilgiri Süd-Indiens (Münster Lit 2006); Ethnologie. Eine Einführung (Vandehoek & Ruprecht 2011). In 2013 he co-edited The Modern Anthropology of India (Routledge) with Peter Berger. Contact: Frank.Heidemann lmu.de

Research Cluster: Adivasi / Anthropology of India
Research Cluster: Adivasi / Anthropology of India

Erik de Maaker is a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University in the Netherlands. He has specialized on South Asia, particularly the upland communities of its eastern borderlands. He is working on changing notion of relatedness and belonging, notably in religious contexts, and wrote a PhD that takes mortuary rituals as a starting point for an analysis of social change in upland Northeast India. Methodologically, the material and performative (ritual, celebration) dimensions of culture tend to be central to his research. This includes the redefinition and re-appreciation of ‘traditional’ cultural ideas and practices (‘heritage’), and their growing importance in terms of ethnicity, indigeneity and nationalism. More recently, his research has come to encompass people’s relatedness to land, and the environment, and how access and use is contested between distinct claim holders such as local communities and the state. Research in the peripheries of post-colonial states has raised his interest in the growing importance of Asia’s borders, and he is one of the founders of the Asian Borderlands Research Network . Erik de Maaker is also a Visual Anthropologist, and produced several ethnographic films (such as the award winning ‘Teyyam, the Annual Visit of the God Vishnumurti’), as well as multimedia DVDs. For an overview of publications and films see: http://leidenuniv.academia.edu/ErikdeMaaker . Contact: emaaker gmail.com

Research Cluster: Anthropology of India
Research Cluster: Anthropology of India

Anastasia Piliavsky is a social anthropologist with degrees from Boston University and from Oxford, where she read anthropology as a Rhodes Scholar. She has worked in Rajasthan for more than a decade and has written about politics, crime (and ‘criminal castes’) and secrecy for Modern Asian Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Cambridge Anthropology, and other journals. She is currently Research Fellow at King's College (Cambridge), co-Investigator in a large, collaborative study of democratic cultures and ‘muscular’ politics in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (funded by the British and European Research Councils) and editor of Patronage as the Politics of South Asia (CUP, 2014). She is also interested in how South Asian deities shape human lives and in questions of hierarchy and caste, as well as the accumulation of anthropological insight into South Asian society. Contact: apiliavsky gmail.com

Research Cluster: Anthropology of India
Research Cluster: Anthropology of India

Harald Tambs-Lyche, professor emeritus, Université de Picardie - Jules Verne, Amiens, studied at Bergen and at SOAS, London, writing his thesis on the Patidar emigrants from Gujarat (London Patidars, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1980). Here, he explores the implications of Barth’s theories of ethnicity for an urban and modern setting. Turning to studies on the history and theory of caste, he worked on Saurashtra, Gujarat. Power, Profit and Poetry (Manohar, Delhi, 1997) traces the changing constellations of caste from the end of the classical period in Saurashtra (ca. 800 C.E.) to the colonial period. The Good Country (Manohar, Delhi, 2004). approaches caste in contemporary society from an interactional point of view. Business Brahmins (Delhi, Manohar, 2011), on the Gauda Saraswat Brahmins of coastal Karnataka, deals with the relations caste identity entertains to ethnicity and class in a situation where all three are salient. His caste studies underline the importance of conflict, competition and power relations, but stress the presence of a hierarchizing mode of interaction and discourse, inspired by Dumont but more particularly by McKim Marriott. He is presently finishing a more systematic presentation of this approach (Demystifying Caste: Elements for a Theory – forthcoming). He has also worked on Hinduism, particularly the Goddess cult (The Feminine Sacred in South Asia (ed.), Manohar, Delhi 1999) and on the Swaminarayana Sect. Other works include a study of Scandinavian missionaries among the Santals, co-authored with Marine Carrin (An Encounter of Peripheries, Manohar, Delhi 2008) and a collection of essays on crisis and identity among India’s peripheral populations (People of the Jangal, co-edited with Marine Carrin, Manohar, Delhi, 2008). He has participated in the recent rush of Gujarat studies, notably as co-editor with Nikita Sud of a special number of the review South Asia, (Religion in the making of a Region, 2011). Contact: tambs live.fr

Last modified:28 March 2024 10.05 a.m.