Biography
Dr Anastasia Piliavsky is a social anthropologist who specialises on India’s democratic politics, political corruption and crime, and the role of vernacular values, especially the hierarchical, in India’s politics and otherwise social life.
Anastasia studied anthropology at Boston University and at Oxford, where she received her DPhil and taught at Bristol and Cambridge before coming to King’s in 2018.
She has written about crime, policing and corruption in India, about secrecy and the public sphere, about India’s ‘criminal castes,’ political gangsterism, patronage and democracy, and on social theory and the history of anthropology at large.
Between 2012 and 2016, she co-Investigated an European Research Council (ERC) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project on democratic cultures in South Asia. She is now developing a large international project on India’s 'Vernacular political vocabularies'.
Research
Anastasia is interested in India’s vernacular norms of personhood and relatedness, and the way that they orient India’s democratic process. She is especially interested in ways that hierarchical values – idioms of kingship, patronage and divinity – shape how Indian citizens’ conceptions of political representation and responsibility, and their broader visions of social good. She is also now writing about what the distinctive character of India’s democratic thinking shows about democracy as such.
Teaching
Postgraduate
PhD supervision
Anastasia welcomes applicants looking to work ethnographically on India’s democracy, and those interested in studying values, and ideas of personhood and relatedness, in any aspect of contemporary Indian life.
Further details
See Anastasia's research profile
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Piliavsky, A., 20 May 2020, (Accepted/In press) In : CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY. 23 p. Research output: Contribution to journal - Article
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Piliavsky, A., 24 Nov 2020, (Accepted/In press) Stanford: Stanford University Press. 320 p. (South Asia in Motion) Research output: Book/Report - Book
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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. 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. 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
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Piliavsky, A., 1 Nov 2014, Patronage as Politics in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 154-175 21 p. Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding - Chapter
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Piliavsky, A., 12 Jun 2012, In : AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST. 114, 2, p. 369-370 2 p. Research output: Contribution to journal - Review article
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Piliavsky, A., 17 Jan 2018, In : Anthropology of This Century. 21, p. 1-5 5 p. Research output: Contribution to journal - Review article
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Piliavsky, A., 1 Aug 2019, In : Anthropology of This Century. 527, 24, p. 1-3 3 p., 121185. Research output: Contribution to journal - Article. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2019.121185
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Piliavsky, A., 12 Nov 2013, Theory in social and cultural anthropology : An encyclopedia. London: Sage Publications Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding - Entry in encyclopedia/dictionary