Akhil Gupta

Last updated

Akhil Gupta
Akhil Gupta, 2020.jpg
Akhil Gupta in 2020
Born1959
Occupation(s)anthropologist, university professor
Known forProfessor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Akhil Gupta (born 1959) is an Indian-American anthropologist whose research focuses on the anthropology of the state, development, as well as on postcolonialism. He is currently a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a former president of the American Anthropological Association. [1]

Contents

Education

Gupta attended St. Xavier's School in Jaipur and graduated in 1974. Gupta did his undergraduate studies in Mechanical Engineering from Western Michigan University, following that with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [2] Gupta then spent the next eight years getting a Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford University.[ citation needed ]

Career

Research

In 1992, while still at Stanford, Gupta along with fellow Stanford anthropologist James Ferguson wrote the well-known and oft-cited essay, "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference." [3] which argued that the analytic concept of culture had remained largely unproblematized by anthropological discourse, and that anthropologists of the day had failed to recognize and analyze the politics of cultural difference, how such differences were produced, and how such differences were used and abused by the state and by capital. The article argues for the examination of cultural anthropology as an unconscious mechanism of neo-imperialism.[ citation needed ]

Gupta has done extensive work in rural North India. In his book, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India, Gupta analyzes whether and how post-colonial theory can be applied to subaltern rural places. He attempts to understand the growth of modern India through its agricultural sector. Most of his work has taken place in the western part of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Gupta has also tried to understand the ethnography of the state - as lived, understood and discussed in rural India.[ citation needed ]

He is also a leading figure in the anthropology of the state, and is the co-editor of a book of collected essays called The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. [4]

Tenureship controversy

Gupta was unanimously approved for tenure in 1996 at Stanford, but was then denied tenure by the dean John Shoven. However, in the face of outcry from across the academy as well as mobilization by students, the dean's decision was overturned. [5] [6] [7]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

Early infanticidal childrearing is a term used in the study of psychohistory that refers to infanticide in paleolithic, pre-historical, and historical hunter-gatherer tribes or societies. "Early" means early in history or in the cultural development of a society, not to the age of the child. "Infanticidal" refers to the high incidence of infants killed when compared to modern nations. The model was developed by Lloyd deMause within the framework of psychohistory as part of a seven-stage sequence of childrearing modes that describe the development attitudes towards children in human cultures The word "early" distinguishes the term from late infanticidal childrearing, identified by deMause in the more established, agricultural cultures up to the ancient world.

Medical anthropology studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation". It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives. It is one of the most highly developed areas of anthropology and applied anthropology, and is a subfield of social and cultural anthropology that examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or influenced by issues of health, health care and related issues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Anthropological Association</span> Learned society in Virginia, U.S.

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists, linguists, medical anthropologists and applied anthropologists in universities and colleges, research institutions, government agencies, museums, corporations and non-profits throughout the world. The AAA publishes more than 20 peer-reviewed scholarly journals, available in print and online through AnthroSource. The AAA was founded in 1902.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Napoleon Chagnon</span> American cultural anthropologist (1938–2019)

Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring. His 1967 ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People became a bestseller and is frequently assigned in introductory anthropology courses.

Political anthropology is the comparative study of politics in a broad range of historical, social, and cultural settings.

Cross-cultural may refer to

History of anthropology in this article refers primarily to the 18th- and 19th-century precursors of modern anthropology. The term anthropology itself, innovated as a Neo-Latin scientific word during the Renaissance, has always meant "the study of man". The topics to be included and the terminology have varied historically. At present they are more elaborate than they were during the development of anthropology. For a presentation of modern social and cultural anthropology as they have developed in Britain, France, and North America since approximately 1900, see the relevant sections under Anthropology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthropology of media</span> Scientific study of the creation of mass communications and its workers

Anthropology of media is an area of study within social or cultural anthropology that emphasizes ethnographic studies as a means of understanding producers, audiences, and other cultural and social aspects of mass media.

Richard Allan Shweder is an American cultural anthropologist and a figure in cultural psychology. He is currently Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.

Biocultural anthropology can be defined in numerous ways. It is the scientific exploration of the relationships between human biology and culture. "Instead of looking for the underlying biological roots of human behavior, biocultural anthropology attempts to understand how culture affects our biological capacities and limitations."

Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology and biological anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists, and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge, in the sense of what they think subconsciously, changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.

Tom Boellstorff is an anthropologist based at the University of California, Irvine. In his career to date, his interests have included the anthropology of sexuality, the anthropology of globalization, digital anthropology, Southeast Asian studies, the anthropology of HIV/AIDS, and linguistic anthropology.

Urban anthropology is a subset of anthropology concerned with issues of urbanization, poverty, urban space, social relations, and neoliberalism. The field has become consolidated in the 1960s and 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Ferguson (anthropologist)</span> American anthropologist

James Ferguson is an American anthropologist. He is known for his work on the politics and anthropology of international development, specifically his critical stance. He was chair of the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. His best-known work is his book, The Anti-Politics Machine. He delivered the most prestigious lecture in anthropology, the Morgan Lecture, in 2009, for his work on basic income. He earned his B.A. in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an M.A. and Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University.

Thomas Blom Hansen is a Danish anthropologist and leading contemporary commentator on religious and political violence in India.

Environmental anthropology is a sub-discipline of anthropology that examines the complex relationships between humans and the environments which they inhabit. This takes many shapes and forms, whether it be examining the hunting/gathering patterns of humans tens of thousands of years ago, archaeological investigations of early agriculturalists and their impact on deforestation or soil erosion, or how modern human societies are adapting to climate change and other anthropogenic environmental issues. This sub-field of anthropology developed in the 1960s from cultural ecology as anthropologists borrowed methods and terminology from growing developments in ecology and applied them to understand human cultures.

Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology.

This bibliography of anthropology lists some notable publications in the field of anthropology, including its various subfields. It is not comprehensive and continues to be developed. It also includes a number of works that are not by anthropologists but are relevant to the field, such as literary theory, sociology, psychology, and philosophical anthropology.

Dipankar Gupta is an Indian sociologist and public intellectual. He was formerly Professor in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. For a brief period from 1993 to 1994, he was also associated with the Delhi School of Economics as Professor in the Department of Sociology. His current research interests include rural-urban transformation, labour laws in the informal sector, modernity, ethnicity, caste and stratification. He is a regular columnist with The Times of India, The Hindu and occasionally in The Indian Express and Anandbazar Patrika in Bengali. He serves on the board of institutions like the Reserve Bank of India, the National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (NABARD) and Max India.

Dr. Faye Venetia Harrison is an American anthropologist. Her research interests include political economy, power, diaspora, human rights, and the intersections of race, gender, and class. She is currently Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She formerly served as Joint Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of Florida. Harrison received her BA in Anthropology in 1974 from Brown University, and her MA and PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1977 and 1982, respectively. She has conducted research in the US, UK, and Jamaica. Her scholarly interests have also taken her to Cuba, South Africa, and Japan.

References

  1. "AAA Past Presidents - Connect with AAA". www.americananthro.org. Retrieved 17 February 2023.
  2. "Well-known Anthropologist visits UCT". University of Cape Town. 15 August 2011. Retrieved 21 May 2024.
  3. Gupta, Akhil; James Ferguson (February 1992). "Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference". Cultural Anthropology. 7 (1): 6–23. doi:10.1525/can.1992.7.1.02a00020. JSTOR   656518.
  4. Aradhana Sharma; Gupta, Akhil (2007). The anthropology of the state : a reader ([Nachdr.] ed.). Malden: Blackwell. ISBN   978-1-4051-1467-7.
  5. "Tenure decision on anthropologist to be reconsidered (5/97)". news.stanford.edu. Archived from the original on 20 August 2022. Retrieved 6 July 2021.
  6. "Faculty Board grants tenure to anthropologist Gupta (8/97)". news.stanford.edu. Archived from the original on 10 September 2022. Retrieved 6 July 2021.
  7. Ann Gibbons, "Cultural Divide at Stanford", Science 20 June 1997: Vol. 276, Issue 5320, pp. 1783-1784.