Theory From And With South Asia

This course asks what thinking from and with South Asia can offer anthropological theory and what an anthropological approach can offer the study of South Asia. Keeping the troubled history of area studies in focus, we attend to how the “region” has been formed as a distinct object of study. In other words, this course simultaneously takes South Asia as its subject and its vantage point, while also problematizing what, where, and to whom this phrase refers. We consider a series of texts and films - largely but not exclusively within the tradition of contemporary anthropology - that explore people and places in and across the nation-states known as South Asia. 

Our aim is two-fold: One, we hope to moor anthropological theory in geopolitics. By this, we mean that we are interested in how “regions” come to be exemplary sites of particular theories instead of points of grounded departure for disciplinary-wide conversations. On a related note, we want to understand the conditions under which “region” can be productively invoked in anthropological conversations and when we are advised to leave it behind. Second, we aim to attend to the specificities of the places and people imperfectly referenced by the phrase South Asia. We will touch on classic themes associated with the anthropology of South Asia, including criss-crossing formations of caste, class and gender, and we will put them in conversation with contemporary work on disability, Indigeneity, queerness, and race.