index.html

Skip Navigation

The earth at night, viewed from a satellite.

Krieger School of Arts and Sciences | University Calender | University News | Search JHU

Home

About the Department

Undergraduate Program

Argot Research Journal

Search Anthropology

Department of Anthropology
The Johns Hopkins University
404 Macaulay Hall
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218

Phone 410-516-7272
Fax 410-516-6080

Anand Pandian

Associate Professor
Phone (410) 516-7267
email: pandian@jhu.edu
111 Macaulay

PhD, UC Berkeley, 2004

Recent Courses

Anthropology of Media (course website) -- Ethnographic Writing -- Encountering Experience -- Anthropology and Fiction -- Philosophical Anthropology -- Creative Expression -- Anthropology of the Self -- Anthropological Imagination -- Introduction to South Asia

Research

One problem has been troubling me more than any other: the fate of nature in a human world. How do we perceive, understand, and engage forms of life beyond our own? What does it take to preserve a space for such diversity of life in a contemporary world of overwhelming humanity, inhumanity? There are, of course, parks and sanctuaries that promise to do this for us, like the small one that I walk across each morning to get to work. But I've come to believe that nature isn't just "out there," in the world at large, for us to find, celebrate, miss, or mourn. The force and frailty of things -- the wilting of that limb, this noxious gust of air, that sudden call of a songbird -- are built into the architecture of our own minds and bodies. In this convolution of mind and world, the inside and outside, so much seems to turn on how we think with the worlds in which we find ourselves: our openness to engage whatever beyond us exceeds our knowledge, control, and judgment. Worldly encounters with natural and cultural difference, in other words, are essential to these arts of life and thought. And anthropology, as a science of experience, is helpful in pursuing such encounters with care.

I think that my anthropological fieldwork and writing over the last twelve years has amounted simply to this: a few experiments or exercises in living and thinking with others, with the hope of some insight into the transformative potential of experience. I have explored the worlds of chance and accident in which certain people live, the literary, philosophical and practical traditions that enliven these worlds, and the kinds of stories we can tell about their ecology and aesthetics. My first book, for example, Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Duke University Press, 2009, and Oxford University Press India, 2010), examined how the cultivation of soil, plants, and other living beings in colonial and postcolonial India was enlisted to cultivate a moral life among a community of putative thieves. The "nature" cultivated here was both the lived environment of a rural landscape, as well as the ethical character of those who inhabited it.

Last year, I published a Tamil-language memoir with my grandfather, M. P. Mariappan, a 94-year-old retired fruit merchant in Madurai, and one among thousands of Indian refugees to trek from Burma to India during the Second World War. Entitled Mitcham Meethi: Oru Anubava Kanakku (What Still Remains: A Ledger of Experience, Kalachuvadu, 2012), the book moves back and forth between our voices: between his stories of a century of experience, and those of a diasporic Indo-American grandson who happens to be an anthropologist. At the heart of our dialogues was an essential anthropological problem: What is there to learn and absorb from the experience of others whose trials are so different from our own? An English edition of this project is under contract with Indiana University Press.

I am currently midway through a book concerning experience in a media-saturated world. Tentatively called Living in a World of Cinema, the project relies on close ethnographic work over the last six years with Tamil film directors, cameramen, producers, actors, designers, composers and editors. I am concerned here with the affective ecology of filmmaking: the deep immersion of filmmakers themselves in cinematic worlds of experience. The book tries to convey some of this affective texture through certain cinematic devices of writing, focusing attention on specific horizons of experience such as time, imagination, hope, light, sound, fear, rhythm, and speed. As a small complement to this project, I am also editing, for Chennai-based Blaft Publications, a screenplay translation and collection of essays on M. Sasikumar's 2008 Tamil film, Subramaniapuram.

Anthropology is a wildly collaborative endeavor, sustained through the pursuit of many different conversations at once. 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) explored diverse textual, historical, and quotidian answers to the question of how one ought to live. Another edited book project on "Literary Anthropology" is underway with Stuart McLean (University of Minnesota) and eight other anthropologists, in which we hope to confront some of the central stakes and challenges of experimental writing in contemporary anthropology.