Anastasia Piliavsky | King's College London (original) (raw)

Books by Anastasia Piliavsky

Introduction to NOBODY'S PEOPLE: HIERARCHY AS HOPE IN A SOCIETY OF THIEVES, 2020

This book gives an account of hierarchy as a source of active social imagination, as a normative ... more This book gives an account of hierarchy as a source of active social imagination, as a normative idiom and a set of social principles through which the people I have known in India advance their lives. Taking readers on an ethnographic journey to the North Indian countryside, it shows how hierarchy frames, motivates, and enables my Indian hosts’ and interlocutors’ ambitions, and why they look to it as a vehicle of their hopeful pursuits. It shows how and why hierarchy operates as a cultural resource for the making and unmaking of persons, why people appeal to it to assert their worth and pursue better lives, how it assists their movement through the social ranks—and why its absence can lead to social obliteration.

What if we could imagine hierarchy not as a social ill, but as a source of social hope? Taking us... more What if we could imagine hierarchy not as a social ill, but as a source of social hope? Taking us into a "caste of thieves" in northern India, Nobody's People depicts hierarchy as a normative idiom through which people imagine better lives and pursue social ambitions. Failing to find a place inside hierarchic relations, the book's heroes are "nobody's people": perceived as worthless, disposable and so open to being murdered with no regret or remorse. Following their journey between death and hope, we learn to perceive vertical, nonequal relations as a social good, not only in rural Rajasthan, but also in much of the world-including settings stridently committed to equality. Challenging egalo-normative commitments, Anastasia Piliavsky asks scholars across the disciplines to recognize hierarchy as a major intellectual resource.

Does patronage always imply a corruption of democratic political processes? Across sixteen essays... more Does patronage always imply a corruption of democratic political processes? Across sixteen essays by historians, political scientists and anthropologists Patronage as Politics in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2014), edited by Anastasia Piliavsky, explores this question and many more across a range of historical and cultural contexts. The volume’s collective drive to ask difficult and theoretically nuanced questions about the role of patronage in South Asia, gives the book a coherence that plays wonderfully against the contributions’ eclecticism and diversity.

From the back cover: ‘By insisting that what we call “patronage” is above all a moral idiom, and... more From the back cover:
‘By insisting that what we call “patronage” is above all a moral idiom, and by rejecting arguments that would prefer to confine patronage to the theoretical dustbin referred to as “tradition”, this brilliant volume will transform the study of South Asian politics. It combines a stellar assembly of researchers and imaginatively analysed case studies, and will provoke exciting debates about the past, present and future of democracy - both in South Asia itself, and far beyond.’
Jonathan Spencer, Professor of the Anthropology of South Asia
University of Edinburgh

‘It is remarkable how much the historical course in India is guided rather by institutional memories and their persisting structural paradigms. Testifying to this reproduction of the past in modern political garb, essay after essay of this fine work offers a nuanced, anthropological sense of how cultural order is revealed by historical change, even as the change manifests a historical order.’
Marshall Sahlins, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
The University of Chicago

'Even those of us who see the importance of patronage waning will find an abundance of crucial insights in these subtle, deeply learned analyses.'
James Manor, Professor of Commonwealth Studies
University of London

‘This excellent book demonstrates the importance of maintaining a focus on morality as it intersects with political and economic process ... Drawing on rich empirical case material, it is a refreshing and revitalizing “return” to the category of patronage that will be valuable to both regional specialists and those with a broader interest in global political processes.’
Jon P Mitchell, Reader in Anthropology, Director of Doctoral Studies for Global Studies
University of Sussex

Chapters, articles, talks, reviews by Anastasia Piliavsky

Current Anthropology, 2023

Does equality have to be democracy's orienting value? My answer is: no. Read on to see why - and ... more Does equality have to be democracy's orienting value? My answer is: no. Read on to see why - and why it matters - for understanding politics in India and far, far beyond.

HAU:Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2022

This special section approaches "politics" from a specifically ethnographic point of view. It doe... more This special section approaches "politics" from a specifically ethnographic point of view. It does this by privileging ethnographically derived political concepts rather than more familiar preestablished and supposedly universal categories of political analysis. This introduction offers a general theoretical framework for doing this, and establishes a shared language of analysis. It situates current developments in relation to the history of political anthropology and of the broader discipline, and proposes a definition of the domain of political anthropology through an emphasis on politics as collective ethics. It then reflects on the relationship between language and concepts, and the articulation of different "global" hierarchies of value.

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2019

In the Gray Zone. In conversation with Gregory Feldman, Pál Nyíri, and Jatin Dua about crime, mor... more In the Gray Zone. In conversation with Gregory Feldman, Pál Nyíri, and Jatin Dua about crime, moral judgment, and problems of jurisdiction.

Anthropology of This Century, 2019

Anthropology of This Century, 2018

Debates on the epistemological, ethical, and historical constitution of the anthropological corpu... more Debates on the epistemological, ethical, and historical constitution of the anthropological corpus are one of the reasons why anthropology has always thrived. Whether in terms of the complex relation between the production of anthropological knowledge and the political systems in which it takes place, or the proliferation of the language of " mutual constitution " as a way to bypass questions of causality, the question of the " suffering " vs. the " good, " the attribution of " colonial " or " white male privilege " to ethnographic classics, or the hackneyed debates on the precariousness of academic life, contemporary anthropology is traversed by critical shortcuts, worn paths we often take, without reflecting on them. This first installment of a new journal section titled " Shortcuts " aims to investigate and question the analytical, historical, and interpretive arguments that have become common knowledge in anthropology, intuitively true and agreeable, yet rarely subject to rigorous scrutiny and discussion. The first " Shortcut " engages with the question " Why read the classics? " and offers six varied responses by scholars who deal with how the anthropological canon is produced and what is at stake in preserving it, going back to it, or getting away from it.

Everybody hates bureaucracy – even bureaucrats hate bureaucracy (who likes stamping forms all day... more Everybody hates bureaucracy – even bureaucrats hate bureaucracy (who likes stamping forms all day long?) – but David Graeber hates it more than most.

This study of the moral logic of the striking success of goondas (gangsters or toughs) in North I... more This study of the moral logic of the striking success of goondas (gangsters or toughs) in North Indian politics comes by way of a comment on intellectual method in the anthropology of moralities. More especially, it offers critical remarks on the recent adoption of ‘virtue’ as the cardinal moral co-ordinate of human life. Drawing on field research conducted across northern India, we show that when people celebrate goondas as leaders, they do so not because they see in them virtuous men, but because they think them capable of ‘getting things done’. This ethics of efficacy is neither merely instrumental nor is it but another variant of virtue ethics. It presents, instead, an altogether different moral teleology orientated towards effective action rather than excellent character. While challenging the self-centred bent of the late anthropology of ethics, we also make preliminary remarks on the contrast between ‘moral’ and ‘practical’ judgement, and the limits of ‘the moral’ as such.

Witsoe’s is the most rigorous ethnographic account to date of what may well be the world’s most f... more Witsoe’s is the most rigorous ethnographic account to date of what may well be the world’s most fervent democracy. Essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of the subcontinent, it shows just how much anthropologists can teach political analysts, if only we pass over their jejune theories and turn instead to the world.

Patronage is a structural pivot of social life in South Asia. Drawing on the ethnography of relat... more Patronage is a structural pivot of social life in South Asia. Drawing on the ethnography of relations between a caste of professional thieves in rural Rajasthan, known as Kanjars, and their patron-goddesses, I show that patronage is also, crucially, a normative formula which encompasses a set of values. I examine the nature of these values, and why the Kanjars value them such a lot, to show an alternative sense of hierarchy, based neither on substantive values (like purity or auspiciousness) nor on transactions, but on a set of relational values (like attachment and generosity) which may have cardinal provenance beyond the given context.

Introduction to NOBODY'S PEOPLE: HIERARCHY AS HOPE IN A SOCIETY OF THIEVES, 2020

Current Anthropology, 2023

HAU:Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2022

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2019

Anthropology of This Century, 2019

Anthropology of This Century, 2018

This paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereot... more This paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahminical narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics’ pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonial uses of the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

In Patronage as Politics in South Asia, edited by Anastasia Piliavsky, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3-37., Oct 31, 2014

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Aug 31, 2014

What animates India’s spirited and complex political sphere? What logic guides its inhabitants i... more What animates India’s spirited and complex political sphere? What logic guides its inhabitants in tense engagement with the ideas and institutions of political modernity? In what terms and through what values does the majority of the country perceive its political reality? And what colloquialisms shape demotic political life? This workshop brings together a network of anthropologists, historians, and textual scholars to comparatively examine the languages of India’s political life in the contexts of their actual usage, both in the present and the past, with the goal of generating a deeper understanding of India’s political lexicon in the vernaculars.

The world today faces a crisis of responsibility. We have no idea how to assign responsibility fo... more The world today faces a crisis of responsibility. We have no idea how to assign responsibility for the meltdown of 2008 or the noxious air and water with which many of the world’s denizens must still live. Nor do we know how to make our own grandees—bankers, oligarchs, CEOs, political leaders—effectively accountable at all. Impersonal and increasingly automated regulative processes—bureaucracy, auditing, financial software and the like—deepen confusion still further by eliminating human subjects as carriers of responsibility.

Our workshop explores the deep social roots of this crisis through a comparative investigation of different cultural orders of responsibility. Bringing social anthropologists into conversation with philosophers and other social scientists, we will examine how different social orders—hierarchical, individualist, egalitarian—distribute responsibility, allocate social duties, and hold their members to account. How do the different ways of placing persons within a society relate to the different cultural allocation of responsibility? How do different norms of personhood and relatedness shape conceptions of social obligation and prescribe means of discharging it? What happens to structures of responsibility when regimes of valuation shift or radically transform? And how do the different orders of responsibility relate to the asymmetries of power and privilege, and the ways these are normatively conceived?

Hierarchy offers an instructive contrast to the Euro-American case, since it allocates responsibility with a clarity lacking in egalitarian schemes. What lessons might egalitarians draw from hierarchical modes of allocating responsibility? And in what ways do hierarchical arrangements already resemble the egalitarian, in ways an egalitarian normative sense may fail to appreciate or even recognize? What can we learn from alternative egalitarian and individualist schemes? And finally, how do these reflections help us to square the notion of individual, equally distributed responsibility with the de facto asymmetries of resources, status and power, and the stated requirements of accountability?

This workshop challenges the ‘flattening’ of the social terrain both in popular imagination and in social theory, which relies increasingly on individualist tropes like ‘agency’ and socially horizontal, mechanistic models like ‘networks’ or ‘reciprocity’. In doing this, we hope to bring into sharper focus the rapidly globalizing egalitarian normativity, whose implications are as political as they are intellectual.

What do people around the world want and not want from democracy? And what effect do their desire... more What do people around the world want and not want from democracy? And what effect do their desires have on whether or not they politically engage? Tackling the question of political participation around the world, this panel joins three political analysts and an anthropologist in a comparative discussion of democracy in Britain, Russia, India and the Middle East.

Four drastically different places and four distinct points of view will bring to the table the force of broad cross-cultural comparison to bear on the most urgent problems which haunt democracies around the globe and at home.

With Mary McCauley (on Russia), Helen Thompson (on Britain), Mukulika Banerjee (on India) and Andrea Teti (on the Middle East)

Recent political developments in South Asia left new types of leaders and leadership in their wak... more Recent political developments in South Asia left new types of leaders and leadership in their wake. Nepal’s transition to democracy; mass political protests in Pakistan; the landslide election of Narendra Modi as India’s new prime minister; and the rapid influx of criminal politicians all raise pressing questions of authority, leadership and legitimation.

These questions have enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the study of the subcontinent, but they have recently been made redundant as social scientists turned to concerns of violence and ‘power’. Inviting contributions on all forms of leadership (political, moral, religious and otherwise) in the region and the global South Asian diaspora, we ask participants to consider what makes South Asia’s leaders acceptable or even intensely desirable in their followers’ eyes. What institutions, ideas and practices give persons the right to lead, represent or rule? What obligations and potencies does this right entail? And how do established local conventions of legitimation shape—and are shaped by—new institutions, circumstances and norms?

Whether hailed as the distinctive essence of South Asian society or decried as its singular curse... more Whether hailed as the distinctive essence of South Asian society or decried as its singular curse, caste continues to exercise both lay and scholarly imaginations. But whose idea was caste anyway? And what is it for? And isn’t it just another word for an antique order of exploitative inequality? And why won’t it go away? What is it about caste that makes it persist, in myriad new incarnations and in face of great social, economic and political change on the subcontinent?

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Stanford University Press eBooks, Nov 18, 2020

Anthropology Today, Aug 1, 2015

This narrative examines the demotic idiom of political bonds in the world's largest democracy.

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Jan 12, 2017

Modern Asian Studies, Nov 12, 2012

This paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British In... more This paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India's itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century.

Comparative Studies in Society and History, Mar 29, 2011

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This special section approaches "politics" from a specifically ethnographic poi... more This special section approaches "politics" from a specifically ethnographic point of view. It does this by privileging ethnographically derived political concepts rather than more familiar preestablished and supposedly universal categories of political analysis. This introduction offers a general theoretical framework for doing this, and establishes a shared language of analysis. It situates current developments in relation to the history of political anthropology and of the broader discipline, and proposes a definition of the domain of political anthropology through an emphasis on politics as collective ethics. It then reflects on the relationship between language and concepts, and the articulation of different "global" hierarchies of value.

Anthropology of This Century, 2019

Cambridge Anthropology, 2013

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Oct 16, 2014

Comparative Studies in Society and History, Mar 20, 2015

American Anthropologist, Jun 1, 2012

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2016