A Post-Independence Ethnography of Academic Anthropology and Sociology in India
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Anthropological Generations: A Post-Independence Ethnography of Academic Anthropology and Sociology in India by Nurolhoda Bandeh-Ahmadi A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) in The University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Andrew Shryock, Chair Professor Emerita Gillian Feeley-Harnik Professor Bruce Mannheim Professor George Steinmetz Professor Ajantha Subramanian, Harvard University Nurolhoda Bandeh-Ahmadi [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0657-0402 © Nurolhoda Bandeh-Ahmadi 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Over the past decade, there have been many times when I doubted whether this dissertation would ever come into existence. I am first and foremost indebted to four people, mentors, who have supported me through the entirety of what has been quite a ride, and made it possible for me to even get to this point of writing acknowledgments. They are Andrew Shryock, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, and Bruce Mannheim—the members of my committee at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan—and Laura Nader, my undergraduate mentor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Their brilliance and wisdom as scholars has only been surpassed by their kindness, understanding, and patience as teachers. If anyone reads these acknowledgments in an effort to determine “who I worked with,” those are the names you are probably looking for. That said, the support of countless more people has been invaluable in making this dissertation happen. I am also particularly indebted to Ajantha Subramanian, at the Harvard University Department of Anthropology, and George Steinmetz, at the University of Michigan Department of Sociology, for their support, advice, and feedback. Thomas Trautmann and Varuni Bhatia were helpful, particularly during my time in their classes—on kinship and devotional traditions, respectively—which were formative of my thinking about intellectual kinship. ii I am not sure how to begin to thank the past and present students, non-academic staff, teaching staff, administrators, and other associates of the University of Delhi (DU) Department of Anthropology, Delhi School of Economics Department of Sociology, and Lucknow University Department of Anthropology. I regret that I have been unable to adequately describe or express even a small fraction of the incredible kindness and generosity they showed me in this account, but I am deeply grateful to them for it. I cannot name them all here, but I would like to particularly express my gratitude to my research supervisor at the DU Anthropology Department, a junior professor and students in that department whose friendship has meant a great deal to me, the late IP Singh, Nadeem Hasnain, and the members of the Research Scholars’ Group and Association of Students for Equitable Access to Knowledge at the Delhi School of Economics. This dissertation was made possible by funding from a Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Grant, a Fulbright Critical Language Enhancement Award, a University of Michigan Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship, and two summer Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). Preliminary fieldwork was supported by a University of Michigan Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant and a Department of Anthropology Margaret Wray French Fund grant. A Rackham Emergency funding allowed me to make a short trip home from India for a family emergency. A William Y. and Nettie K. Adams Fellowship in the History of Anthropology at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, a University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) Community of Scholars fellowship, a Rackham One-Term fellowship, and Department of Anthropology Marshall Weinberg and Mischa Titiev fellowships supported the writing of the iii dissertation. The staff and scholars at all of these organizations have been of great assistance as I navigated the dissertating process. I especially thank Laurie Marx, Debbie Fitch, Cate McCraw, Kari Beall, Darlinda Flanigan, and Julie Winningham at the University of Michigan Department of Anthropology; Michael Brown, Maria Spray, and Laura Holt at the School for Advanced Research; Neeraj Goswami at the United States-India Educational Foundation; the teachers and staff at the AIIS Urdu and Hindi language programs; and Victor Mendoza at IRWG. I thank Sunayana Walia and Usha Sanyal for their assistance with housing in Delhi (as well as their friendship), without which I would have been unable to conduct fieldwork in India, let alone for such an extended period. I am also grateful for the support of a number of other dear friends who overlapped with me in India for their own research or studies; particularly, Isabel Huacuja, Naveena Naqvi, Kamal Arora, Elizabeth Thelen, Sean Singh Chauhan, Catherine LaRouche, Sara Hakeem Grewal, Harjeet Grewal, Sahil Warsi, Nishaant Choksi, Marena Lin, Pragya Dhital, and Irene Pang. I am grateful to Andrew Amstutz, Andrea Wright, Geoffrey Hughes, M Mather George, William Benton, and the other members of the summer 2017 IRWG Community of Scholars for their helpful comments on sections of this dissertation. David Price, Eli Thorkelson, Sikandar Maitra Kumar, Leslie Hempson, Tapsi Mathur, Gurveen Khurana, and Puninder Singh Jaitla have all come to my aid at various points with their expertise on topics relating to South Asia, critical university studies, and the history of anthropology. And here, without naming them, I must thank my colleagues at the University of Delhi and Lucknow University for also helping me improve my knowledge of literature on South Asia and social anthropology, whether they realized it or iv not. One of the perks of doing fieldwork with colleagues was the opportunity to broaden my personal understanding of what the landscape of scholarship looks like. I noticed this even more strongly upon my return, when I would think of their work whenever I encountered others working on related issues. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their patience and extraordinary levels of support through this arduous process. My parents and my sister actually read and gave me feedback on parts of this dissertation. Indeed, my family is most responsible for my intellectual curiosity and interest in understanding the world around me. I could not have finished without the encouragement of and/or joint writing sessions with friends like Monica Eppinger, Rachael Stryker, Brad Erickson, Danielle Corcoran, Jennifer Bowles, Alex Skylar, Jane Lynch, Joshua Shapero, Angelica Serna, Isabel Huacuja, and Andrew Amstutz—and I apologize to those I am sure I am leaving out at the moment. Rebecca Grapevine saved me and this project on a number of occasions early on, and I cannot thank her enough. Alysa Handelsman, Andrea Wright, Lauren Whitmer, Geoff Hughes, Dana Kornberg, Lamia Moghnieh, Linda Takamine, and Anna MacCourt have had to hear more about the stresses of this research and graduate school than anyone should ever have to. More than that, they have played a huge part in helping me shoulder that weight and pull through to the end, both through fruitful intellectual conversations, and emotional support. I don’t know what I would have done without them, but I am very grateful for them. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii ABSTRACT vii CHAPTER I. Introduction 1 II. “Scenes of Inheritance” 17 III. Biswas and Boundaries 52 IV. “How to Think” 102 V. Naga Spears 155 VI. Limits 210 VII. Conclusion 230 WORKS CITED 240 vi ABSTRACT This ethnography of three North Indian academic departments from India’s independence in 1947 until 2015 draws on anthropological studies of kinship to examine scholars’ generational relations as a lens on social, institutional, political, and economic processes involved in ethnographic knowledge-making. It finds that these intellectual genealogies should be understood not only as intellectual influence or teacher-student relationships, but also at once as socially produced (and sometimes competing) ideas affecting how scholars conceive of their academic worlds, relate to each other, and navigate or help build their fields and institutions. It then illustrates the significance of this intellectual kinship to how academic cultures are created, how an academic elite is formed, the shaping of disciplinary boundaries, and the workings of world academic hierarchies. vii CHAPTER I Introduction “Ethnography,” I sometimes only half-jokingly tell my friends, “has, of all scientific approaches, the biggest bang for your buck! It’s the greatest and possibly most underrated value for investment. Just think, for the price of a single piece of biomedical laboratory equipment, you could fund multiple ethnographic research projects. Ethnographers don’t generally require very costly equipment—their greatest expenses are often just transportation, food and shelter. So, for the paltry price of subsistence, you can get an anthropologist to investigate some aspect of human life in depth for years. A committed one—and many are—may willingly risk life and limb, endure all manner of danger and suffering in service to this cause. What’s more, the likelihood of success is comparatively quite high in that you’re almost guaranteed a well- prepared ethnographer will return with invaluable insights about infinitely complex phenomena. Granted, these may not be the insights you were hoping to hear; if they do their job right, it will probably involve