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OBITUARY for APARNA RAO (1950–2005) Michael Bollig

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OBITUARY for APARNA RAO (1950–2005) Michael Bollig OBITUARY FOR APARNA RAO (1950–2005) Michael Bollig Aparna’s last two books have just been published (Rao, Aparna. 2008. The Valley of Kashmir: The Making and Unmaking of a Composite Culture? and Rao, A. Bollig and Böck. 2007. The Practice of War – Production, Reproduction and Communication of Armed Violence. London: Berghahn.) – almost four years after her premature death. Both books had been her last big projects. The first book deals with the complex culture(s) of Kashmir and their contemporary development and the second book focuses on anthropological perspectives on new forms of violence. She worked on various contributions with a lot of energy, straightened the course of arguments and put language straight. It is her path-breaking energy, her academic astuteness and her immense talent for in-depth questioning of scientific arguments, which her colleagues will fondly remember. It was also her tactfulness and modesty which made it easy for us to listen to her well-founded arguments. Aparna died on 28 June 2005 after being severely sick for about a year. Due to her premature death, international anthropology has lost an excellent, highly innovative and diverse researcher. Her departure will be particularly felt in the field of studies on nomadic populations. Together with her husband Michael ? = username NOMADIC PEOPLES (2009)$REMOTE_ASSR = IP address VOLUME 13, ISSUE 1, 2009: 1–9 doi: 10.3167/np.2009.130101Sat, 25 Sep 2021 17:22:10 ISSN 0822-7942 = Date (Print), & Time ISSN 1752-2366 (Online) Michael Bollig Casimir, she chaired the Commission for Nomadic Peoples and edited the Journal for Nomadic Peoples for many years. Her ethnographic and theoretical publications on peripatetic populations, as well as her research on the nomadic Bakkarwal of Kashmir, are milestones in the research on mobile communities. Beyond this, Aparna published widely and influentially on conflict and violence in addition to social structure and gender issues, especially in the South Asian context. Aparna was born on 3 February 1950 in New Delhi as the third child of a historian and an Anglicist. Both her parents had studied at Oxford and both had been engaged in the political struggles of India during their time. Through her parents, Aparna was confronted with the grave socioeconomic problems of India and became acquainted with the role of academia in societal struggles. Although belonging to an elite family, social conscience and personal responsibility were core motivations for her later academic engagements. Aparna studied in Europe, as did her parents: French literature at the University of Strasbourg, where she completed her studies with a diploma in 1969, and later, cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistics and sociology at the same university. She completed her anthropological studies in Strasbourg with the M.A. thesis ‘Les Sinté du pays rhenan. Essai d’une monographie d’un sous-groupe tsigane’. Throughout her academic life, Aparna ingeniously worked on diverse anthropological topics, although her interest in mobile populations stayed at the core of her academic explorations. In 1974, she began studies for her Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied anthropology, geography and Islamic studies. In the late 1970s she conducted about two years of fieldwork among peripatetic peoples in Afghanistan. There she studied the peripatetic Ghorbat, a mobile, endogamous minority community that offers various services to other communities. The Ghorbat are despised and of low status, and fieldwork with such a community demands a high degree of commitment and energy. Aparna’s excellent Ph.D. work ‘Les Ghorbat d’Afghanistan. Aspects économiques d’un groupe itinerant ‘jat’, supervised by the renowned academic Xavier de Planhol, was defended in 1980 and published in 1982. In subsequent years, Aparna combined her in-depth knowledge of the Ghorbat with her interest in comparative studies. She found that many of these endogamous minority communities around the world share similar features: they are spatially mobile, and do not produce food, but obtain their subsistence through exchanging services with dominant populations. More often than not they are also despised by the larger society. It was Aparna’s great achievement to shape the concept of ‘peripatetic community’ and to show that such communities were a socioeconomic category to be distinguished from pastoralists, agriculturalists and foragers. While Aparna’s academic theoretical interests were broad, so to was her commitment and experience in ethnographic fieldwork. In an excellent manner, she was able to link empirical inquiry, ethnographic description and anthropological generalization. For her M.A. thesis, she undertook fieldwork with Sinti communities in the Alsass. Between 1975 and 1977, she worked for about two 2 NOMADIC PEOPLES (2009)? = username VOLUME 13 ISSUE 1 $REMOTE_ASSR = IP address Sat, 25 Sep 2021 17:22:10 = Date & Time Obituary for Aparna Rao years with the peripatetic Ghorbat of Afghanistan. During this period of extended fieldwork she met her future husband, Michael Casimir, in Afghanistan where he was then undertaking fieldwork among the pastoral Pashtuns. Aparna and Michael married in 1980 and when Michael obtained a position as Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, both of them made Cologne their home. In an amazingly short time, Aparna learned German to perfection and when I first met her in 1984, her German language proficiency was so good that you could hardly tell that she was not a native speaker. It was this immense talent for learning languages which enabled Aparna to master, not only her mother-tongues Bengali, Hindi and English, but also French, Farsi, Urdu, Romanes and some vernacular languages of northern India. Together with her husband Michael, Aparna started to work on the Bakkarwal of Kashmir in the late 1980s. In an ideal combination, her ethnographic insight and competence in local languages, as well as Michael’s expertise in ecology, led to a number of highly interesting publications on the political and cultural ecology of Bakkarwal high altitude pastoralism in the Himalayas. Due to the escalating violence in Kashmir, her research interests shifted towards an analysis of ethnic, religious and political conflicts in Jammu and Kashmir. It was Aparna’s great achievement to describe and analyse the manifold and dynamic linkages among separatist claims, religious fundamentalism and local economics in the Kashmir conflict. Her intense empirically grounded knowledge on northern India was extended further with a study on rural communities in eastern Rajasthan in the second half of the 1990s. There she focused on human/environmental relations among the agricultural community of the Bishnoi. Among the Bishnoi, religious beliefs shape profound parts of their engagement with the environment and nature. Between 2000 and 2002, Aparna again made several shorter field stays in Kashmir in order to restudy the Bakkarwal. At that time, she was especially interested in gaining a long-term perspective on the history of this community. Aparna’s great passion was to link empirical data with complex theoretical considerations. Her long experience as an ethnographer in highly diverse settings and circumstances immunized her from rash theoretical conclusions. If theory was meaningful, then it had to be based on an astute understanding of the complex linkages among economics, social organization and belief systems, and it had to bear in mind the manifold interrelations between different spatial and temporal scales. It is this enthusiasm for both empirical research and theoretical explorations that Aparna brought to her students in the 1990s while teaching at the Institutes for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universities of Cologne and Heidelberg. Aparna loved to teach smaller groups of students, and excelled when discussing research projects with individual students about to embark on their first fieldwork stints. It was her scepticism towards mass-teaching, but also her abhorrence of the power politics of academia, which made her decide not to follow the conventional academic career path which ends with a professorship at an academic institution. Nevertheless, her academic influence on a young generation of researchers was VOLUME 13 ISSUE 1? = username NOMADIC PEOPLES (2009) 3 $REMOTE_ASSR = IP address Sat, 25 Sep 2021 17:22:10 = Date & Time Michael Bollig felt at both Cologne, where she taught as an Assistant Professor and at Heidelberg, where she substituted the departmental chair between 1993 and 1995. In June 2005 – just a few months before her death – Aparna was appointed Directeur de Recherche at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, a prominent position which was tailor-made for her great passion and vast experience in ethnographic fieldwork. Aparna’s diverse research interests led to a great number of publications. She authored, co-authored, edited and co-edited twelve books and ninety contributions to scientific journals and edited volumes. Many of us remember her working patiently and painstakingly on our manuscripts, and in many instances, she almost rewrote contributions to make them fit a scientific format. It was using this particular approach that she initiated young scholars into the art of writing scientific papers. Between 1995 and 2003 she was the editor of the Journal of Nomadic Peoples together with Michael Casimir and William Lancaster,
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