Dr Henrike Donner

Dr Henrike Donner received her MA from the University of Munich and her PhD from the LSE. Her PhD and postdoctoral projects have explored the interplay of gender, kinship and reproductive change in relation to class and post-liberalisation policies. Since 1995 she has conducted fieldwork in Calcutta (Kolkata), India, which has focused on the transformation of marriage and conjugal ideals, medicalised birth and maternal bodies, food consumption and the impact of privatised healthcare and schooling on middle-class lifestyles. Her work is concerned with socio-economic change as part of the process of globalisation and the way class is reproduced through institutions like marriage and the family and constituted through gendered, everyday practices. She has also published on urban space and fieldwork in the postcolonial city. Her ongoing research deals with the legacy of the militant Naxalite movement that emerged in urban West Bengal and is concerned with personal experiences of radical politics in the 1970s.

Selected publications:

Forthcoming. ‘Ties We Choose’: Masculinity, kinship and friendship within a revolutionary movement and beyond. In Windows to the Revolution: Maoism in India and Nepal, Alpa Shah and Judith Pettigrew (eds), London: Hurst.

2008. Between the verandah and the mall: Fieldwork and the spaces of femininity. In Dislocating Anthropology? Bases of Longing and Belonging in the Analysis of Contemporary Societies, Simon Coleman and Peter Collins (eds), Newcastle: Scholars Press.

2008. Domestic Goddesses: Maternity, Globalisation and Middle-Class Identity in Contemporary India, Aldershot: Ashgate.

2008. New Vegetarianism: Food, gender and neo-liberal regimes in Bengali middle-class families South Asia, Special Issue ‘Memory, Pleasure and Politics’, 31(1), 143-169.

2006. (co-edited with Geert De Neve) The meaning of the local: Politics of place in urban India. London: Routledge.

2006. Committed mothers and well-adjusted children: Privatisation, early-years education and motherhood in Calcutta middle-class families. Modern Asian Studies 40(1), 1-25.

2005. Reflections on gender and fieldwork in the city. In Geert De Neve and Maya Unnithan-Kumar (eds), Critical Journeys: The Making of Anthropologists, Aldershot: Ashgate.

2004. Labour, privatisation, and class: Middle-class women’s experience of changing hospital births in Calcutta. In Maya Unnithan-Kumar (ed.), Reproductive Agency and the State: Cultural Transformations in Childbearing, Oxford: Berghahn.

2004. The Naxalbari path: Reason and emotion in the personal lives of political activists. Occasional Papers Series, Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge University (vol. 4, no.2).

2003. The place of birth: Pregnancy, childbearing and kinship in Calcutta middle-class families. Medical Anthropology 22(4): 303-341.

2002. One's own marriage: Love marriages in a Calcutta neighbourhood. South Asia Research 22(1): 79-94.

Some of papers are accessible through LSE Research Online.

Dr Donner's fieldwork photos can be viewed through the LSE Library Archives catalogue here.

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