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Dr Anastasia Piliavsky

Anastasia Norton-Piliavsky
Role: 
Zukerman Fellow
Subject: 
Social Anthropology
Email: 
an379@cam.ac.uk
Room: 
CG12

Anastasia studied Social Anthropology at Boston and Oxford Universities and has previously done research in Russia and Mongolia. Her great ethnographic love is the Indian province of Rajasthan, where she has done the bulk of her archival and field research, with her most recent project focusing on a community of professional thieves and its involvement in the governance of rural Rajasthan. The analytical thrust of the study revolves around norms of relatedness and the logic of rank in Indian society more broadly. She is currently interested in donor-servant (or ‘patron-client’) relations, the pre-colonial history of ‘criminal castes’, gossip and secrecy, the history and ethnography of policing and judicial institutions, as well as the culture of politics in South Asia today.

Books

  • Forthcoming in March 2014. Patronage in South Asia. (edited, CUP).

Chapters and articles

  • Accepted. The Criminal Tribe in India before the British. Comparative Studies in Society & History.
  • 2014 (in press) The Morals of Visibility and the Public Sphere in Rural Rajasthan. In Vernacular Public Arena & Democratic Transformation in India:, edited by Taberez Neyazi et al. London: Routledge.
  • 2013 (Sept) Where is the Public Sphere? Political Communications and the Morality of Disclosure in Rural Rajasthan. Cambridge Anthropology, 27/3.
  • 2013 (Sept) Edmund R. Leach. In Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. Jon McGee & Richard L. Warms (eds.). Sage.
  • 2012 The Moghia Menace, or the Watch over Watchmen in British India. Modern Asian Studies, 47/3: 751-779.
  • 2011 A Secret in the Oxford Sense: Thieves and the Rhetoric of Mystification in Western India. Comparative Studies in Society & History, 53/2: 290-313.
  • 2006 Secrets in the ‘Field’: The Antics of Researching Rajasthan’s Banditry. Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, 21: 1-21.
  • 2013 (Dec). Borders without Borderlands: On the Social Reproduction of State Demarcation in Western India. Borderlands Lives in Northern South Asia, edited by David N. Gellner. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.