Radhika Govindrajan | Ghosts of Scandals Past: Anthropology and the Re-Membered Village

The South Asia Center presents Radhika Govindrajan from Columbia University.

This talk draws on ethnographic fieldwork in rural northern India to explore how literal ghosts of scandals past animate debate around the question of what makes a village a village. The talk explores how classical anthropological constructions of the village shape these debates in unexpected and troubling ways. 

Radhika Govindrajan is an associate professor of anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. She is working on a book manuscript titled The Village is a Scandal: Sexual Politics and the Making of Rural India.