I am an anthropologist working at the intersections of the material and the symbolic.
My research interests have pursued three broad social phenomena and their related questions – each focusing on problems of explanation and context-sensitive policies:
- Group formation & inequality (caste, race) – how social groups (such as castes) form through practices of belonging and affinity, how status operates as power, how inequalities are socially reproduced, how groups vary internally, how caste and race intersect and diverge, comparative theories of explanation; how identities and inequalities intersect.
- Culture & Legitimation – how is social inequality justified, legitimized, naturalized, culturalized? how does culture aid legitimation of inequality? how do forms of inequality adapt to new political-economic conditions? how is cultural difference politically constructed, variation within marked populations, cultural theory, structural explanations, sociality and individualization
- State & development policy (sanitation, domestic work, indebtedness, livelihoods) – how worker subjects form in urban informal and domestic work, how and why social practices change (or not) through state policy on toilets and sanitation, how context shapes livelihood strategies such as microcredit and migration, toilet use and defecation practices, how and why does the state reproduce market logic within the citizenry?
These questions have shaped my research on caste formation and reproduction, on issues of inequality, development, and policy (domestic workers; state projects of large-scale behavioral change – toilet use and sanitation), and on ideological domination (food politics, ethnonationalism).
I am a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Community and Social Justice at William Paterson University of New Jersey, USA. Most of my students are first-generation college goers, a large proportion are new immigrants, a majority are minoritized, and a majority work at least one job – making my job as a teacher as exciting as it is challenging, and with the classroom being a place for keeping me grounded in reality.
My journey to anthropology has been from the bilges of Indian merchant naval ships as a marine engineer, and through corporate cubicles as a software developer in the USA. While sailing the seas taught me about dignity of labor, and lessons on power, crisis, hierarchy and work within enclosed spaces, my stint in software development gave me glimpses into racialized workforces and technological change. Neither equipped me however, to answer my dimly articulated questions but long-felt concerns about inequalities and historical subjectivities in social life. That was until I moved in/to anthropology. My research projects interweave these concerns with public engagement, most recently with the state county on issues of houselessness and housing & food insecurity.
