(Ph.D, Cornell, 2006; Assistant Professor, SAS) Social and Cultural Anthropology, violence and conflict, media, religion and ritual, sacrifice and renunciation, symbolic anthropology, psychoanalysis, religious and ethnic identification, nationalism, social theory
I am indebted to long term ethnographic field work in diverse societies and settings which strives to remain sensitive to dynamics of encounter, transference, and reflexivity. The ethnographic engagement includes a thorough reading of ethnographic and anthropological literature, as well as an engagement with social and cultural theory. I have conducted ethnographic research in the United States, Gibraltar, and India.
http://anthro.rutgers.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=175&Itemid=136
“Ahimsa, Identification, and Sacrifice in the Gujarat Pogrom”
Abstract
This paper analyzes the central role of ahimsa in the imaginary that motivated, justified, and made sense of the Gujarat pogrom while it unfolded in 2002. It demonstrates how complicity in the pogrom was tied to an imagery of sacrifice invoked through a language of ritual and diet. Central Gujarat is often called the “laboratory of Hindutva,” a Hindu nationalist ideology that awakens “Hindus” in opposition to Muslims and Christians, who are positioned as foreigners. By means of the spectacle of uncanny terrorism, the deployment of sacrificial language, rumors of abduction of young women, and circulation of images of excess, a Hindu victim is mimetically constructed through Muslim victimization. In this context, ahimsa, initially deployed as an ethical critique of the violence of sacrifice, was transformed into an element of violent identification, contributing to widespread complicity among residents of the city of Ahmedabad.
