Stanford University
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Kabir Tambar
Associate Professor of Anthropology
BioKabir Tambar has been conducting ethnographic and historical research in Turkey since 2003, primarily focused on the critical study of secularism and semiotic approaches in anthropology. His work centers on questions of temporality in political modernity, or the narrative threads that bind our sense of the present to both an inherited past and an anticipated future.
Tambar’s first book, The Reckoning of Pluralism (Stanford, 2014), explored how Alevis in central Anatolia encounter and interrogate the promises of secular modernity. The book offered a critical study of how state authorities (along with academics, journalists, and intellectuals) seek to define and discipline the parameters of religious difference, such that ostensibly epistemological questions about the writing of history have come to shape governing imperatives to regiment public enactments of Alevi religion. The book is also especially interested to reveal how Alevi engagements with Islamic tradition, including in practices of ritual mourning, enable alternative ways of narrating the religious past and its inheritance in the present.
After completing this research project, Tambar began to study inter-communal expressions of solidarity. Initially, the work developed in response to the massive, country-wide Gezi Park protests, with particular attention to the tensions and misunderstandings that accompany the emergence of new political friendships. From this starting point, Tambar began a decade-long inquiry into the history of irresolute and foiled friendships that have unsteadied the politics of the nation-state for over a century. He is now completing a new book manuscript, tentatively titled After Friendship: An Ottoman History of Disaffection, that examines the erosion of friendship as a credible discourse of late Ottoman and Turkish republican politics in the past century. Rather than redeem friendship as a normative ground for understanding political possibilities today, the book excavates the failing of friendship as a historical problem, asking how social actors — especially Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds — have grappled with the attenuation of solidarity and the estrangement of political identification. -
Sharika Thiranagama
Associate Professor of Anthropology
BioSharika Thiranagama's work has consistently explored how political mobilization and domestic life intersect, focusing on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization. This work and broader comparative theorization rests on understanding how people actually live together, often in highly fractious and unequal ways, situating these processes in specific historical formations of vernacular “privates” and “publics” in South Asia.
Her work is based in Sri Lanka and in Kerala, South India. In Sri Lanka, her primary research (In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka 2011) was on civil war, political violence, home, displacement, militarization, family particularly intergenerational and gendered relations in wartime and post war life. This work takes these themes through the lives of Sri Lankan Tamil and Sri Lankan Muslim minorities. Other work includes the history of railways, the BBC world service, masculinity, leadership and popular militancy, etc.
Her work in Kerala focuses on the long-lasting legacy on enslavement and caste in the lives on contemporary agricultural Dalit laboring families, examining caste, gender, household economies, house and neighborhood spaces through their inheritance and future affordances. Articles examine the house, public and private in India, inheritance as inequality, and caste and neighborliness.
Her future work will take an examination of inheritance, caste and family back to Sri Lanka for new fieldwork in Jaffna with Tamils and Muslims after Sri Lanka’s recent economic collapse and postwar caste conflicts. -
Mudit Trivedi
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
BioMudit Trivedi is an archaeologist with interests in religious subjectivity, materiality, craft and historical anthropology.
His first book project, An Archaeology of Virtue, considers the archaeology of conversion to Islam through the results of an ongoing long-term archaeological project he has co-directed at the site of Indor in Rajasthan, North India. This research bridges archaeological and anthropological conceptualizations of tradition. It considers the thematizations of ethical relations, hierarchies and gendered pious praxis in material media. It brings together analyses of architectural, spatial and artifactual datasets combined with compositional elemental analyses. The project’s wider goals are to rethink the secular modern commitments of archaeology and the nature of the archaeological trace.
Mudit is also interested in developing critiques of archaeology’s disciplinary commitments to liberal values and legal infrastructures. A first paper from this project critically re-situates colonial Treasure Trove laws that framed the archaeological common good around the taking of finds from others. This second project reconsiders archaeological praxis and the discipline’s recourse to property law in a series of South Asian contexts ranging from accidental finds to disputes centred on waqfs.
His forthcoming publications relate to these combined interests. They cover archaeometric insights into social contexts of glass artifact production and use in South Asian and other contexts; the long-term settlement history of the region of Mewat in North India, and theoretical problems in the historical and archaeological study of religion and conversion. He has co-edited a special issue of the Medieval History Journal on ‘Archaeologies of the Medieval in South Asia’.