 Amit Desai is a social anthropologist with a special interest in India. He read law for his first degree and studied anthropology as a postgraduate at the LSE (PhD 2007. He has attended universities in Britain, France, and the USA. Dr Desai has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Maharashtra, India, and his research explores processes of religious transformation as marginalised people in an Adivasi (or ‘tribal’) area convert from non-sectarian ‘mainstream Hinduism’ to the Mahanubhav Hindu sect. Using this transformation as a lens, he examines causal and contingent processes such as the decades-old Maoist insurgency in the area; the impediments to dealing with witchcraft and sorcery; and the participation of people in Hindu nationalist projects of inclusion and exclusion.
He is particularly interested in the connections between religious experience and nationalist identification, and this has led him to consider questions of subjectivity, agency and power, moral practice, and transformations in personhood and sociality. He is also interested in the relationship between South Asian anthropology and historiography.
|
|
