ID card as “Casual Student,” University of Mysore, 1971

Paithan, Maharashtra, March 1992

Agra, January 2009

I went to India as an undergraduate student on a semester abroad program in 1971.  An opportunity to join Dr. K. C. Malhotra in his research on nomads led to fieldwork in 1975 and 1976 - the heart of the Emergency, which made it all the more interesting - and then language training in Telugu, and finally dissertation fieldwork on the council (panchayat) of the nomadic Nandiwallas in 1979.  I went back to study caste councils in 1992, fieldwork that produced little on caste councils but led to the “Antagonistic Tolerance” project, and I did further research in Goa in 2009.

These projects and their resultant publications are found at the links below:

“Service nomads”

“The Cultural Ecology of Service Nomads,” Eastern Anthropologist (1977)

Caste panchayats & legal anthropology

“Excommunication as Everyday Event & Ultimate Sanction,” Journal of Asian Studies (1983)

“A Note on Caste Panchayats & Government Courts in India: Different Kinds of Stages for Different Kinds of Performances.” 22 J. Legal Pluralism 43 (1984)

“Turn-taking, Overlap and the Task at Hand: Ordering Speaking Turns in Legal Settings.” American Ethnologist (1987)

“Rape and Rape Avoidance in Ethno-National Conflicts: Sexual Violence in Liminalized States.” American Anthropologist, 102: 27–41.

Book: Disputes & Arguments Amongst Nomads.

Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999

Antagonistic Tolerance India articles

“Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans.”  Current Anthropology (2002)