Moynihan-South Asia Center presents: Bhrigupati Singh

SAC presents: Bhrigupati Singh

Bhrigupati Singh, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Brown University

Poverty and the Quest for Life: Somewhere between the Rural and the Urban in South Asia

In this talk the author discusses their recent book Poverty and the Quest for Life (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Set in Shahabad, an area of extreme poverty in rural Rajasthan, and focusing on the Sahariyas, a community of former bonded laborers, this book asks what the terms “aspiration” and “quality of life” might mean within such a milieu. Further, the author describes how some of the concepts and insights from this book move into their current fieldwork in psychiatric clinics in low income “resettlement colonies” in Delhi.

Sponsored by the South Asia Center at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology and Religion