Papers by Nayanika Mathur
Differentiating Development
Commoning Ethnography, 2020
In this Introduction, we take two persistent tropes of fieldwork, the ‘trial by fire’ and the ‘he... more In this Introduction, we take two persistent tropes of fieldwork, the ‘trial by fire’ and the ‘heroic fieldworker’ to task. Our analysis traces out what we call everyday decentering of these tropes, which we argue is necessary for fieldwork to be taught and engaged with beyond romanticised twentieth century masculinist heroics. We argue that anthro-pology and related field research based disciplines might be better served by adopting a more ethnographic approach towards the lived reality of fieldwork. Through our review, we situate the contribution that the six pieces in this volume make to pedagogies of the field. Readers are invited to continue this conversation about fieldwork futures in anthropology’s second century.
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2020
On the 21 st November, 2019 the Home Minister of India, Amit Shah, announced the extension of a n... more On the 21 st November, 2019 the Home Minister of India, Amit Shah, announced the extension of a nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Parliament. Soon after slogans and posters demanding "NRC se azadi" (freedom from the NRC) and "NRC waapis-lo" (take the NRC back) were to become central to the anti-CAA protests that spread like wildfire across India. On the face of it, the NRC is just another bureaucratic modality of identifying and documenting its citizens-a desire to know who is an Indian, which has been central to the post-colonial state as it was to the colonial state (Sriraman 2018). India is not alone in this statist drive to fully verify its citizens with similar sorts of registers, fairly common in for instance, Western Europe. Interestingly, the more overtly dangerous and technologically new form of identification-Aadhaarhas not provoked a public outcry in India similar to those in other countries. If we compare the introduction of a biometric ID in India to other parts of the world, we see stronger resistance and critiques with countries like the UK abandoning a comparable biometric-based ID project. Why, then, did azadi from the NRC become so central to the public protests? And how did this proposed register come to vocalize a wider sense of discontentment with the politics of the contemporary Indian state? In this paper, I demonstrate the need for "NRC se azadi" through recourse to two words that the Home Minister has used in his speeches over 2019: "process" and "chronology." While "aap chronology samjhiye" (you understand the chronology) is now one of the more famous of Shah's utterances; the process part is somewhat less widely commented on. Yet, I argue that the NRC-as-process is as, if not more, sinister than the NRC as part of a CAA-NRC chronology. NRC-as-process Two aspects of the NRC are, by now, well known. The first is that Assam has served as the laboratory of the NRC. As Suraj Gogoi has noted, "the soul of NRC is to be located in
Anthropocene Unseen, 2020
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2015
Social Anthropology, 2020
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2017
This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licens... more This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credit(s).
American Anthropologist, 2019
Modern Asian Studies, 2017
This article studies corruption in India through an ethnographic elaboration of practices that ar... more This article studies corruption in India through an ethnographic elaboration of practices that are colloquially discussed as the ‘eating of money’ (paisa khana) in northern India. It examines both the discourse and practice of eating money in the specific context of the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (NREGA). The article works through two central paradoxes that emerge in the study of corruption and the state. The first paradox relates to the corruption–transparency dyad. The ethnography presented shows clearly that the difficulties in the implementation of NREGA arose directly out of the transparency requirements of the statute, which were impeding the traditional eating of money. Instead of corruption being the villain it turns out that, in this particular context, it was its categorical Other—transparency—that was to blame. The second and related paradox emerges from an ethnographic examination of the processes and things through which developm...
Modern Asian Studies, 2019
In a political culture that experiences inordinately high levels of petitioning, what makes for a... more In a political culture that experiences inordinately high levels of petitioning, what makes for a successful petition? This article studies petitions that have been efficacious in their appeals to capture or kill big cats in Himalayan India. The rates of success for any appeal against big cats are low in contemporary India, given the stringent legal regime that is geared almost exclusively towards the protection of the charismatic and endangered big cats as well as the hegemonic position occupied by wildlife conservationism. Furthermore, not only is it difficult to petition against cossetted big cats, but it is also not an easy task for any petition to be heard and acquiesced to. Through an ethnography of efficacious petitions, this article makes three related interventions. First, and in the process of attending to the rarity of a handful of efficacious petitions, this article argues for expanding our conceptualization of what, in practice, a petition is. It does so by outlining th...
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2012
This article examines an attempt by the Indian state to render its developmental operations “tran... more This article examines an attempt by the Indian state to render its developmental operations “transparent.” It does so by tracking the implementation of India's ambitious social security legislation, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA). NREGA is premised on the introduction of a vigorous transparency into a notoriously flawed state delivery system. On the basis of long‐term immersion in the everyday world of government offices in northern India, I argue that transparent governance is, quite literally, made by documents. An ethnographic focus on “transparent‐making documents” leads me to argue that they had the ironic and entirely unintended effect of making this particular developmental law extremely difficult to implement. I demonstrate my thesis on the crisis of implementation by attending initially to the overwhelming volume and forms of labor expected from lower‐level development bureaucrats to produce the transparent‐making documents. Subsequently, I tur...
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Papers by Nayanika Mathur