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Thomas Blom Hansen (born 22 January 1958 in Frederiksvaerk) is a Danish anthropologist and leading contemporary commentator on religious and political violence in India.
Hansen has a BA in Sociology and an MA in political theory from the University of Aalborg in Denmark. He then did development work in Orissa, India, in the mid-1980s. He became interested in anthropology during a PhD on Indian nationalism in Pune and Mumbai in western India, begun in the late 1980s when he was unexpectedly granted a research visa to study nationalism. [1] He graduated from Roskilde University and his D.Phil. was later made into a book (The Saffron Wave, 1999).
Hansen taught in the multidisciplinary International Development Studies program at Roskilde University until 1999, becoming associate professor. He spent one year as a visiting scholar at the University of Natal (Durban) in 1998–99, where he also began new research. He then became a reader in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in late 1999, resigning to become professor of anthropology at Yale University. In 2006, he accepted a chair of religion and society at the University of Amsterdam, where he also served as dean of the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences. Since 2010 he has been the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor in South Asian Studies and professor in anthropology at Stanford University. He also serves as director of Stanford's Center for South Asia. [2]
He has two children with his first wife, and is married to an assistant professor at Stanford Sharika Thiranagama, daughter of the Tamil activist Rajini Thiranagama (1954 –1989). [3] [4] They have a son and daughter.
Hansen's research in India focused initially on the rise of militant Hindu nationalism. He began a study of its local roots and organization in Pune, one of the historical strongholds of the larger Hindu nationalist movement. Later, he studied the Shiv Sena, a powerful militant movement in Mumbai that played a dominant role in the political and social life for several decades. This was in the early 1990s when violent clashes occurred between Hindu nationalists and Muslims.
In the late 1990s he worked on religious identities, local political organization and informal networks in Bombay/Mumbai (Wages of Violence, 2001).
In the late 1990s and again in 2007 he worked on religious revival and the everyday meanings of freedom and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa, based in a formerly Indian township in Durban (Melancholia of Freedom, 2012).
More generally he has contributed to understanding of the anthropology of politics, the postcolonial state and sovereignty, and identity politics in urban environments.
Hansen is part of an international research network entitled "The Religious Lives of Migrants," funded by the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council in New York, which explores religious meanings and institutions among international migrants in Kuala Lumpur, London and Johannesburg.
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Hindutva ("Hindu-ness") is the predominant form of Hindu nationalism in India. The term was formulated as a political ideology by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923. It is used by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other organisations, collectively called the Sangh Parivar.
Religious nationalism is the relationship of nationalism to a particular religious belief, dogma, or affiliation. This relationship can be broken down into two aspects: the politicisation of religion and the influence of religion on politics.
Dr. Rajani Thiranagama was a Tamil human rights activist and feminist who was assassinated by Tamil Tigers cadres after she had criticised them for their atrocities. At the time of her assassination, she was the head of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Jaffna and an active member of University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna, and was is one of its founding members.
Arjun Appadurai is an Indian-American anthropologist recognized as a major theorist in globalization studies. In his anthropological work, he discusses the importance of the modernity of nation states and globalization. He is the former University of Chicago professor of anthropology and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Humanities Dean of the University of Chicago, director of the city center and globalization at Yale University, and the Education and Human Development Studies professor at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture.
The Chitpavan Brahmin or Konkanastha Brahmin is a Hindu Maharashtrian Brahmin community inhabiting Konkan, the coastal region of the state of Maharashtra. Initially working as messengers and spies in the late seventeenth century, the community came into prominence during the 18th century when the heirs of Peshwa from the Bhat family of Balaji Vishwanath became the de facto rulers of the Maratha empire. Until the 18th century, the Chitpavans were held in low esteem by the Deshastha, the older established Brahmin community of Maharashtra region.
In the Bombay riots in December 1992 and January 1993, an estimated 900 people died. The riots were mainly due to escalations of hostilities after large scale protests by Muslims in reaction to the 1992 Babri Masjid Demolition by Hindu Karsevaks in Ayodhya; and by Hindu mobs in regards with the Ram Temple issue.
Partha Chatterjee is an Indian political scientist and anthropologist. He was the director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta from 1997 to 2007 and continues as an honorary professor of political science. He is also a professor of anthropology and South Asian studies at Columbia University and a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.
Integral humanism was a set of concepts drafted by Deendayal Upadhyaya as a political program and adopted in 1965 as the official doctrine of the Jan Sangh and later BJP. Upadhyaya borrowed the Gandhian principles such as sarvodaya, swadeshi (domestic), and Gram Swaraj and these principles were appropriated selectively to give more importance to cultural-national values. These values were based on an individual's undisputed subservience to nation as a corporate entity.
Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad, she wrote on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.
Mark Juergensmeyer is an American sociologist and scholar specialized in global studies and religious studies, and a writer best known for his studies on comparative religion, religious violence, and global religion. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.
Peter van der Veer is a Dutch academic who is the Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen in Germany. He has taught anthropology at the Free University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University and the University of Pennsylvania. Van der Veer works on religion and nationalism in Asia and Europe.
Hindu Revolution is a term in Hindu nationalism referring to a sociopolitical movement aiming to overthrow untouchability and casteism to unified social and political community to create the foundations of a modern nation.
Angana P. Chatterji is an Indian anthropologist, activist, and feminist historian, whose research is closely related to her advocacy work and focuses mainly on India. She co-founded the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir and was a co-convener from April 2008 to December 2012.
Christophe Jaffrelot is a French political scientist and Indologist specialising in South Asia, particularly India and Pakistan. He is a professor of South Asian politics and history the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po (Paris), a professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King's India Institute (London), and a Research Director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS).
There have been several instances of religious violence against Muslims since the partition of India in 1947, frequently in the form of violent attacks on Muslims by Hindu nationalist mobs that form a pattern of sporadic sectarian violence between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Over 10,000 people have been killed in Hindu-Muslim communal violence since 1950 in 6,933 instances of communal violence between 1954 and 1982.
Christopher John Fuller is an emeritus professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has studied and written extensively about the people of India, particularly with regard to subjects such as Hinduism, the caste system, and the relationship between globalisation and the middle-classes.
Lynn Meskell is an archaeologist and anthropologist who currently works as a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Joseph S. Alter is an American medical anthropologist known for his research into the modern practice of yoga as exercise, his 2004 book Yoga in Modern India, and the physical and medical culture of South Asia.
Nissim Mannathukkaren is an associate professor and chair in Dalhousie University's Department of International Development Studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The Rupture with Memory: Derrida and the Specters that Haunt Marxism is his first book (2006).
Sharika Thiranagama is a political anthropologist at Stanford University. She was the president of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies from 2017-2020. Her first book In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011.
