Dr Anastasia Piliavsky

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.

Selected publications

• 2011. A Secret in the Oxford Sense: Theft and the Rhetoric of Mystification in Rural India. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 53/2: 290-313.
• 2006. Secrets in the Field: The Antics of Researching Rajasthan’s Banditry. Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, 21.
• In Press. The Moghia menace: the watch over watchmen in British India. Modern Asian Studies.
• Forthcoming in 2011. Borders without Borderlands: On the Social Reproduction of State Demarcation in Western India. Borderlands in Northern South Asia, Gellner, David (ed.). Duke University Press.
• Forthcoming in 2012. Truth, Truce and Trust: Notes on Adjudication among Thieves in Western India. Pirie, Fernanda & Judith Scheele (eds.). Justice and Community. OUP.

Projects

• Colloquium on Patronage in South Asia (30 September-1 October 2011)
• History & Anthropology at King's Seminar Series