Biography
Anastasia Piliavsky is a social anthropologist, who works on India’s democracy and the role of vernacular values, especially the hierarchical, in India’s social and political life. She is author of Nobody's People: Hierarchy as hope in a society of thieves (Stanford 2020), editor of Patronage as politics in South Asia and Principal Investigator of a European Council-funded project on 'India's politics in its vernaculars'.
Research
Anastasia works on India’s vernacular norms of personhood and relatedness, and the ways in which these orient India’s democratic process. She is especially interested in how hierarchical values – idioms of kingship, patronage and divinity – shape Indian conceptions of political representation and responsibility, and the bigger demotic visions of social and political good. She is working on showing the implications of this work for comparative democratic theory.
Research Interests
- Political language & concepts
- Democratic theory
- Hierarchy & egalitarianism
- Democratic representation
- Political responsibility
- Values & sociality
- Personhood & relatedness
- 'Criminal tribes'
- Kingship
- Political anthropology
- History of anthropology
Teaching
Postgraduate
PhD supervision
Anastasia welcomes applicants who wish to work ethnographically on all aspects of India’s politics, especially those interested in analysing conceptions of representation and responsibility in India's democratic process.
Current and former students:
- Ankita Banerjee
- Silvia Tieri
- Sagar Solanki
Further details
See Anastasia's research profile
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Piliavsky, A., 2013, In: H-NET REVIEWS. Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article
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Piliavsky, A., 2006, In: EDINBURGH PAPERS IN SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES. 21, 1, 21 p. Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Piliavsky, A., 2019, In: Anthropology of This Century. Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article
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Piliavsky, A., 2019, THE Scandal of Continuity in Middle East Anthropology: Form, Duration, Difference. Scheele, J. & Shryock, A. (eds.). Indiana University Press, p. 119-39 21 p. Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
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Piliavsky, A., 2015, In: Anthropology Today. 31, 4, p. 24-27 Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Piliavsky, A., 20 May 2020, (Accepted/In press) In: CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY. 23 p. Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Piliavsky, A., 24 Nov 2020, 1 ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 300 p. (South Asia in Motion) Research output: Book/Report › Book › peer-review
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Piliavsky, A., 1 Jan 2014, Patronage as Politics in South Asia. Cambridge University Press, p. 154-175 22 p. Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107296930.008
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Piliavsky, A., 1 Jan 2014, Democratic Transformation and the Vernacular Public Arena in India. Taylor and Francis Ltd., p. 172-188 17 p. Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315777627
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Piliavsky, A., 12 Nov 2014, Patronage as Politics in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 1-38 38 p. Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review