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Expression -- Anthropological Imagination -- Making Public Culture -- Anthropology of Media -- Anthropology of Personhood -- Introduction to South Asia -- Website for "Anthropology of Media" course and projects
My research explores how people find and fashion worlds of experience for themselves, and how their engagement with these worlds remakes the form of their own selfhood. My first major book project addressed this problem as a question of cultivation, while my second and ongoing research project explores this problem as a question of expression. In both of these instances, I have sought to tack back and forth between the making of inhabited landscapes and the elaboration of interior horizons of selfhood, taking "nature" as a matter of both inhabited environment and subjective disposition. Working primarily in the Tamil-speaking region of south India, I rely upon ethnography to pose the present as a time and space of emergence, cross-hatched by vectors of power, affect, and inheritance. I take up concepts as they arise in the lives of my interlocutors as elements with which to work toward a philosophical anthropology, one that may be suitable for the vicissitudes of contemporary life.
A second major research project now underway takes creative expression as a matter of unpredictable happening and sudden emergence, concerning not only the subjective intuitions of those we may recognize as artists or creators, but also the vitality of the worldly situations in which the newness of their productions arises. The project focuses on the exercise of imagination, the transmission of affect, and the spaces of expression at work in the Tamil-language commercial film industry of south India, relying upon close and sustained ethnographic work with directors, producers, actors and actresses, cinematographers, art directors, music composers, and film editors, on location and in studio settings. I have been exploring how these Indian filmmakers seek creative potential in time and space, tracking the accidents of perception, action, and affection that any given moment may be taken to yield. Ongoing research for this project is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Institute of Indian Studies.
I take anthropology as a dialogic and collaborative practice of scholarly engagement, sustained not only through attempts at engaging and accessible forms of ethnographic writing, but also through the pursuit of interdisciplinary conversation. My co-edited Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference (with Donald Moore and Jake Kosek, Duke University Press, 2003) tracked entangled ideas of race and nature across a wide range of contemporary and historical terrains of power, from persistent urban Brazilian imaginations of Amazonian savagery to the botanical idioms of German linguistic perfection. More recently, my co-edited Ethical Life in South Asia (with Daud Ali, under contract with Indiana University Press) explores ethical practices of selfhood in South Asia, charting diverse textual, historical, and quotidian answers to the question of how one ought to live. All of these research projects have been undertaken at the interstices of anthropology, history, geography, philosophy, and cultural and literary studies.
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