Anthropology of Media (course website) -- Encountering Experience -- Anthropology and Fiction -- Philosophical Anthropology -- Creative Expression -- Anthropology of the Self -- Anthropological Imagination -- Introduction to South Asia My research lies at the intersection of two kinds of anthropological inquiry: philosophical and ecological. I am interested in how we as anthropologists come to encounter thought in worlds of experience other than our own, and in the diverse webs of social, material, affective, and technical relations through which human and non-human entities come to inhabit those worlds. My work has engaged "nature" as a matter of both living environment and malleable subjective disposition, examining how interior and exterior worlds form in relation to each other and the living remnants of the past. An aesthetics of encounter propels not only my fieldwork -- primarily in the Tamil country of south India thus far -- but also my writing, in which I have sought to open horizons of shared thought and felt affinity between my ethnographic interlocutors, thinkers such as Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault, and Deleuze, and diverse literary and aesthetic traditions.
 My first book, Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Duke University Press, 2009, and Oxford University Press India, 2010), finds practices of cultivation at work in the moral horizons of modern development, in the ethical life of desire, deed, and habit, and in the making of living environments for both moral and natural transformation. Focusing on the colonial subjection and contemporary condition of the Piramalai Kallars in south India -- a caste condemned and policed for decades as a "criminal tribe" -- the book seeks to highlight not only the moral potential of ordinary existence, but also the relentless force of accident and chance in the making of ethical lives. Kalachuvadu has recently published excerpts in Tamil.
A second major research project explores the constitution of cinematic worlds of experience, engaging both the subjective intuitions of those we may recognize as artists or creators, as well as the vitality of the worldly situations in which their productions arise. The project relies upon close ethnographic work with directors, producers, actors, cinematographers, designers, composers, and editors in the Tamil-language popular film industry of south India. This research has been 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 science of experience, sustained through intensive fieldwork, accessible writing, and the pursuit of conversation. Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference (co-edited 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. Ethical Life in South Asia (co-edited with Daud Ali; Indiana University Press in 2010, and in South Asia, Oxford University Press in 2011) explores diverse textual, historical, and quotidian answers to the question of how one ought to live. Another collaborative book project on "Literary Anthropology" (with Stuart McLean) is underway, as is a collaborative memoir project with my grandfather M. P. Mariappan, a retired fruit merchant in Madurai.
- "Imagination: Cinematic, Anthropological," under review
- "Landscapes of Expression: Affective Encounters in South Indian Cinema," Cinema Journal, 2011
- "Reel Time: Ethnography and the Historical Ontology of the Cinematic Image," Screen, 2011
- "Cinema in the Countryside: Popular Tamil Film and the Remaking of Rural Life," in Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India's Other Film Industry, 2007
- "Culture, Cultivation, and Civility in the Tamil Country" in History and Imagination: Tamil Culture in the Global Context, 2007
- "Interior Horizons: An Ethical Space of Selfhood in South India," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2010
- "Genealogies de la vertu. Pratiques ethiques in Asie du Sud," with Daud Ali, Anthropologie et Societes, 2009
- "Tradition in Fragments: Inherited Forms and Fractures in the Ethics of South India," American Ethnologist, 2008
- "Devoted to Development: Moral Progress, Ethical Work, and Divine Favor in South India," Anthropological Theory, 2008
- "Pastoral Power in the Postcolony: On the Biopolitics of the Criminal Animal in South India," Cultural Anthropology, 2008
- "Securing the Rural Citizen: The Anti-Kallar Movement of 1896," Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2005
- "Anthropology and the Image of the World," Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 2011
- "Ripening with the Earth: On Maturity and Modernity in South India," in Handbook of Modernity in South Asia, 2011
- "The Cultural Politics of Race and Nature: Terrains of Power and Practice," with Donald Moore and Jake Kosek, in Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, 2003
- "An Ode to an Engineer" in Waterlines: The Penguin Book of River Writings, 2003
- "Predatory Care: The Imperial Hunt in Mughal and British India," Journal of Historical Sociology, 2001
- "Land Alienation in Tirunelveli District," Economic and Political Weekly, 1996
Curriculum Vitae
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