Professor Chris Fuller

Professor Chris Fuller specialises in India. His first fieldwork (1971-2) was in Kerala in southwest India among the Nayars and the Syrian Christians, and his work particularly focused on kinship among the Nayars, famous for their matriliny. In 1976, Fuller started field research in the great temple of Madurai in Tamilnadu, southeast India, which is dedicated to the Hindu goddess Minakshi. During the next twenty-five years, he periodically visited the temple to study the priests, whose lives changed radically during that time, although he also did extensive research on the temple's highly elaborate ritual cycle. From 2003-2005, with other colleagues in LSE, Fuller worked on a major research project, sponsored by ESRC, on regionalism, nationalism and globalisation in India, and his research has focused on middle-class company managers and software professionals in the city of Chennai (Madras). From 2005-08, with Haripriya Narasimhan, he carried out an ESRC-sponsored research project on a group of Tamil Brahmans, focusing on this traditional elite's modern transformation into a migratory, urbanised, trans-national community. Fuller has also researched and written extensively on popular Hinduism and Hindu nationalism, the caste system, the anthropology of the state and other topics.

Selected publications:

2008 (with Haripriya Narasimhan) From landlords to software engineers: migration and urbanization among Tamil Brahmans. Comparative Studies in Society and History 50: 170-96.

2008 (with Haripriya Narasimhan) Companionate marriage in India: the changing marriage system in a middle-class Brahman subcaste. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14: 736-54.

2007. (with Haripriya Narasimhan) Information technology professionals and the new-rich middle class in Chennai (Madras). Modern Asian Studies, 41 (1), pp. 121-150.

2005. (co-edited with Jackie Assayag) Globalizing India: Perspectives from below. London: Anthem Press.

2003. The renewal of the priesthood: Modernity and traditionalism in a South
Indian temple. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Delhi: Oxford University
Press.)

2004. The camphor flame: Popular Hinduism and Indian society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Revised and expanded edition.)

2001. (co-edited with Véronique Bénéï) The everyday state and society in modern India. London: Hurst. (Delhi: Social Science Press, 2000.)

1984. Servants of the goddess: The priests of a South Indian temple. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Some of these publications, and others as well, are available on-line via LSE Research.

Professor Fuller's fieldwork photos can be viewed through the LSE Library Archives catalogue here.