G Pathak
Biographic Data
| ID | 45788 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Pathak |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Pathak |
| SIGNATURE | PATHAK G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3244-0372 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 105 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Plastics and labor
Plastics are ubiquitous in the contemporary practice of medicine, where they are tied to notions of hygiene and quality of care. However, when plastics first infiltrated global medical practice, they did so because of considerations related to patient comfort and durability. It was only after developments in the sterilization of plastics and the aggressive marketing of single‐use plastics that medical plastics came to be emblematic of hygiene as …
The Cruel Optimism of Plastics
The plastic problem is a complex, multi-faceted issue that requires coordinated global action and systemic change to address. In this article, we investigate how what we call 'promissory technologies' affect people's capacities to understand the systemic changes necessary to significantly reduce global dependencies upon plastics. Engaging with Lauren Berlant's conceptualizations of 'cruel optimism' and 'technologies of patience' we delineate thre…
The Statistical View Is Not the Moral View
Disposable plastics are ubiquitous in healthcare, where they are associated with hygiene and infection control. In this article, using the case of disposable medical plastics and drawing from autoethnographic and ethnographic fieldwork in South and Southeast Asia, I describe the negotiations and ethical quandaries involved when scales of care clash and dimensions of care are in conflict. Disposable medical plastics form both a materiality of care…
Charting success for the Plastics Treaty
Plastic pollution and the open burning of plastic wastes
The open burning of plastic wastes is a practice that is highly prevalent across the globe, toxic to human and environmental health, and a critical—but often overlooked—aspect of plastic pollution. Most of the countries where such burning is widespread have laws and policies in place against it; open burning continues nevertheless. In this article, using data from ethnographic fieldwork in urban and rural sites in India, Indonesia, the Philippine…
Navigating Crises of Scale in the Anthropocene
In our contemporary era, anthropologists are increasingly tasked with studying crises of scale—that is, studying issues related to existential threats such as ecological degradation, inequality, and suffering amid landscapes of uncertainty. Such work takes an emotional toll that is rarely acknowledged in anthropological literature. In this article, using our work on plastics as a lens, we ask what anthropologists have to offer that is of real pro…
Plastic politics
The logic of neoliberal environmentalism, which pervades global environmental governance, assumes that consumers’ pro-environmental behavior and choices drive change through the market. The issue of plastic pollution has emerged as a major global environmental challenge in the last decade, and it has not been immune to neoliberal logics. Actors within the plastic industry have long attempted to deflect regulatory attention and public scrutiny by …
Plastic Pollution' and Plastics as Pollution in Mumbai, India
In the last decade, plastic pollution has emerged as a major global issue in public discourse. Nonetheless, there is little consensus on which aspects of plastics constitute the problem. In India, litter, unmanaged disposal, lack of biodegradation, wasteful resource use, threats to bodily integrity and the natural order, and national dishonour are all variously associated with 'plastic pollution'. What exactly, then, does the term reference when …
Plastics in the Pandemic
Anti-plastic discourses have been gaining momentum in the last two decades, increasingly prompting plastic control policies and plastic avoidant behaviour. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has brought a profusion of single-use plastics and plastic packaging. What can this change tell us about shifts in subjective experiences of risk in an environment of hypervigilance? The case of India reveals that the pandemic has shifted attention among the mid…
Nation branding, soft Hindutva, and ecotraditionalism in anti-plastics discourses in India
A recent dimension of India’s nation-branding project, by which it aims to attract investment, trade, human resources, and tourists to the country, has been a focus on a ‘green’ India as a global leader in sustainable development. As part of this strategy, messages aimed at a national and external audience are aligned, and a line is drawn between the country’s putative ecologically sensitive past and a green future. Such messages highlight select…
Ecocommunicability, citizenship, and discourses on plastic control in India
Polycystic ovary syndrome, medical semantics, and the political ecology of health in India
Within public health, investigations into the rise of metabolic syndrome disorders, such as obesity and type II diabetes, following on the heels of globalisation have tended to focus on the twin axes of diet and physical exercise. However, such a limited focus obscures wider transformations in bodily and health-related practices that emerge in response to globalisation. This paper is an exploration of public discourses about PCOS-a hormonal disor…
Permeable persons and plastic packaging in India
In contemporary India, it has become commonplace to hear middle-class people speak of 'chemicals' in the environment, in food, and in everyday commodities. Anxieties revolve around the bodily absorption of these 'chemicals', and plastic packaging has come under particular scrutiny as a source of such leached substances. Although anthropological studies have highlighted South Asian conceptions of the person as permeable and affected, through the e…
The Anthropology of Plastics
Anthropology has largely ignored plastics, even as they have emerged as the paradigmatic material-and problem-of our times. In this article, we make the case for an anthropology of plastics as a priority for environmental and medical anthropological research. Drawing from exploratory fieldwork in India, we briefly highlight the benefits and risks of different types of plastics, identify areas for anthropological investigations of human-plastic en…
They think of a family only in their thirties
Recent anthropological scholarship on marriage in South Asia has chronicled a shift towards companionate marriage, with ideals of companionate conjugality becoming central to middle-class self-representations. However, the role of child-bearing and fertility within these marriages, as emerging life projects related to new family ideals, has not received much attention, even as literature on India has recorded extensive family concern with fertili…
Cleanups, confidence, and cosmetics
Since economic liberalization in 1991, India has been experiencing rapid economic growth and a shift to consumer culture, making it fertile ground for marketers of consumer goods. Historically, sales of beauty products in India had been limited by high taxation, restricted consumer choice, and high levels of poverty; post-liberalization, the country was therefore seen as a market with immense, albeit untapped, potential. However, even as beauty i…
Polycystic ovary syndrome in globalizing India
Presentable
The opening up of the Indian economy through a series of neoliberal reforms since 1991 ushered in processes of globalization that have led to a rapidly changing socio-cultural environment in India. Economic growth, globalizing discourses, and new consumer choices have driven desires for new global-yet-Indian identities. An emerging consumer agency has allowed for the embodiment and performance of these identities at the site of the body, even as …
What Anthropologists Do
What Anthropologists Do Veronica Strang Oxford and New York, Berg Publishing, 2009 224 pp., 50 b&w ill., bibliography, index, ISBN: 9781845203559, £14.99 (paperback) Although anthropology has a ric
Delivering the Nation
The dabbawalas of Mumbai, India, currently ubiquitous in the Indian media, are a community of around five thousand semi-literate people who efficiently deliver lunches daily from homes to offices and schools across the city using its railway network. This paper is an investigation of aspects of the dabbawalas' popularity in the media and of the transformative potential of global cultural flows and media images on this localised community. It demo…
The Anthropology of Plastics
Anthropology has largely ignored plastics, even as they have emerged as the paradigmatic material-and problem-of our times. In this article, we make the case for an anthropology of plastics as a priority for environmental and medical anthropological research. Drawing from exploratory fieldwork in India, we briefly highlight the benefits and risks of different types of plastics, identify areas for anthropological investigations of human-plastic en…
Permeable persons and plastic packaging in India
In contemporary India, it has become commonplace to hear middle-class people speak of 'chemicals' in the environment, in food, and in everyday commodities. Anxieties revolve around the bodily absorption of these 'chemicals', and plastic packaging has come under particular scrutiny as a source of such leached substances. Although anthropological studies have highlighted South Asian conceptions of the person as permeable and affected, through the e…
Plastic Pollution' and Plastics as Pollution in Mumbai, India
In the last decade, plastic pollution has emerged as a major global issue in public discourse. Nonetheless, there is little consensus on which aspects of plastics constitute the problem. In India, litter, unmanaged disposal, lack of biodegradation, wasteful resource use, threats to bodily integrity and the natural order, and national dishonour are all variously associated with 'plastic pollution'. What exactly, then, does the term reference when …
Ecocommunicability, citizenship, and discourses on plastic control in India
Plastic pollution and the open burning of plastic wastes
The open burning of plastic wastes is a practice that is highly prevalent across the globe, toxic to human and environmental health, and a critical—but often overlooked—aspect of plastic pollution. Most of the countries where such burning is widespread have laws and policies in place against it; open burning continues nevertheless. In this article, using data from ethnographic fieldwork in urban and rural sites in India, Indonesia, the Philippine…
Cleanups, confidence, and cosmetics
Since economic liberalization in 1991, India has been experiencing rapid economic growth and a shift to consumer culture, making it fertile ground for marketers of consumer goods. Historically, sales of beauty products in India had been limited by high taxation, restricted consumer choice, and high levels of poverty; post-liberalization, the country was therefore seen as a market with immense, albeit untapped, potential. However, even as beauty i…
Presentable
The opening up of the Indian economy through a series of neoliberal reforms since 1991 ushered in processes of globalization that have led to a rapidly changing socio-cultural environment in India. Economic growth, globalizing discourses, and new consumer choices have driven desires for new global-yet-Indian identities. An emerging consumer agency has allowed for the embodiment and performance of these identities at the site of the body, even as …
They think of a family only in their thirties
Recent anthropological scholarship on marriage in South Asia has chronicled a shift towards companionate marriage, with ideals of companionate conjugality becoming central to middle-class self-representations. However, the role of child-bearing and fertility within these marriages, as emerging life projects related to new family ideals, has not received much attention, even as literature on India has recorded extensive family concern with fertili…
The Statistical View Is Not the Moral View
Disposable plastics are ubiquitous in healthcare, where they are associated with hygiene and infection control. In this article, using the case of disposable medical plastics and drawing from autoethnographic and ethnographic fieldwork in South and Southeast Asia, I describe the negotiations and ethical quandaries involved when scales of care clash and dimensions of care are in conflict. Disposable medical plastics form both a materiality of care…
Plastics in the Pandemic
Anti-plastic discourses have been gaining momentum in the last two decades, increasingly prompting plastic control policies and plastic avoidant behaviour. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has brought a profusion of single-use plastics and plastic packaging. What can this change tell us about shifts in subjective experiences of risk in an environment of hypervigilance? The case of India reveals that the pandemic has shifted attention among the mid…
Nation branding, soft Hindutva, and ecotraditionalism in anti-plastics discourses in India
A recent dimension of India’s nation-branding project, by which it aims to attract investment, trade, human resources, and tourists to the country, has been a focus on a ‘green’ India as a global leader in sustainable development. As part of this strategy, messages aimed at a national and external audience are aligned, and a line is drawn between the country’s putative ecologically sensitive past and a green future. Such messages highlight select…
Navigating Crises of Scale in the Anthropocene
In our contemporary era, anthropologists are increasingly tasked with studying crises of scale—that is, studying issues related to existential threats such as ecological degradation, inequality, and suffering amid landscapes of uncertainty. Such work takes an emotional toll that is rarely acknowledged in anthropological literature. In this article, using our work on plastics as a lens, we ask what anthropologists have to offer that is of real pro…
Plastic politics
The logic of neoliberal environmentalism, which pervades global environmental governance, assumes that consumers’ pro-environmental behavior and choices drive change through the market. The issue of plastic pollution has emerged as a major global environmental challenge in the last decade, and it has not been immune to neoliberal logics. Actors within the plastic industry have long attempted to deflect regulatory attention and public scrutiny by …
Delivering the Nation
The dabbawalas of Mumbai, India, currently ubiquitous in the Indian media, are a community of around five thousand semi-literate people who efficiently deliver lunches daily from homes to offices and schools across the city using its railway network. This paper is an investigation of aspects of the dabbawalas' popularity in the media and of the transformative potential of global cultural flows and media images on this localised community. It demo…
Delivering the Nation
The dabbawalas of Mumbai, India, currently ubiquitous in the Indian media, are a community of around five thousand semi-literate people who efficiently deliver lunches daily from homes to offices and schools across the city using its railway network. This paper is an investigation of aspects of the dabbawalas' popularity in the media and of the transformative potential of global cultural flows and media images on this localised community. It demo…
What Anthropologists Do
What Anthropologists Do Veronica Strang Oxford and New York, Berg Publishing, 2009 224 pp., 50 b&w ill., bibliography, index, ISBN: 9781845203559, £14.99 (paperback) Although anthropology has a ric
Presentable
The opening up of the Indian economy through a series of neoliberal reforms since 1991 ushered in processes of globalization that have led to a rapidly changing socio-cultural environment in India. Economic growth, globalizing discourses, and new consumer choices have driven desires for new global-yet-Indian identities. An emerging consumer agency has allowed for the embodiment and performance of these identities at the site of the body, even as …
Polycystic ovary syndrome in globalizing India
Cleanups, confidence, and cosmetics
Since economic liberalization in 1991, India has been experiencing rapid economic growth and a shift to consumer culture, making it fertile ground for marketers of consumer goods. Historically, sales of beauty products in India had been limited by high taxation, restricted consumer choice, and high levels of poverty; post-liberalization, the country was therefore seen as a market with immense, albeit untapped, potential. However, even as beauty i…
The Anthropology of Plastics
Anthropology has largely ignored plastics, even as they have emerged as the paradigmatic material-and problem-of our times. In this article, we make the case for an anthropology of plastics as a priority for environmental and medical anthropological research. Drawing from exploratory fieldwork in India, we briefly highlight the benefits and risks of different types of plastics, identify areas for anthropological investigations of human-plastic en…
They think of a family only in their thirties
Recent anthropological scholarship on marriage in South Asia has chronicled a shift towards companionate marriage, with ideals of companionate conjugality becoming central to middle-class self-representations. However, the role of child-bearing and fertility within these marriages, as emerging life projects related to new family ideals, has not received much attention, even as literature on India has recorded extensive family concern with fertili…
Polycystic ovary syndrome, medical semantics, and the political ecology of health in India
Within public health, investigations into the rise of metabolic syndrome disorders, such as obesity and type II diabetes, following on the heels of globalisation have tended to focus on the twin axes of diet and physical exercise. However, such a limited focus obscures wider transformations in bodily and health-related practices that emerge in response to globalisation. This paper is an exploration of public discourses about PCOS-a hormonal disor…
Permeable persons and plastic packaging in India
In contemporary India, it has become commonplace to hear middle-class people speak of 'chemicals' in the environment, in food, and in everyday commodities. Anxieties revolve around the bodily absorption of these 'chemicals', and plastic packaging has come under particular scrutiny as a source of such leached substances. Although anthropological studies have highlighted South Asian conceptions of the person as permeable and affected, through the e…
Ecocommunicability, citizenship, and discourses on plastic control in India
Plastics in the Pandemic
Anti-plastic discourses have been gaining momentum in the last two decades, increasingly prompting plastic control policies and plastic avoidant behaviour. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has brought a profusion of single-use plastics and plastic packaging. What can this change tell us about shifts in subjective experiences of risk in an environment of hypervigilance? The case of India reveals that the pandemic has shifted attention among the mid…
Nation branding, soft Hindutva, and ecotraditionalism in anti-plastics discourses in India
A recent dimension of India’s nation-branding project, by which it aims to attract investment, trade, human resources, and tourists to the country, has been a focus on a ‘green’ India as a global leader in sustainable development. As part of this strategy, messages aimed at a national and external audience are aligned, and a line is drawn between the country’s putative ecologically sensitive past and a green future. Such messages highlight select…
Charting success for the Plastics Treaty
Plastic pollution and the open burning of plastic wastes
The open burning of plastic wastes is a practice that is highly prevalent across the globe, toxic to human and environmental health, and a critical—but often overlooked—aspect of plastic pollution. Most of the countries where such burning is widespread have laws and policies in place against it; open burning continues nevertheless. In this article, using data from ethnographic fieldwork in urban and rural sites in India, Indonesia, the Philippine…
Navigating Crises of Scale in the Anthropocene
In our contemporary era, anthropologists are increasingly tasked with studying crises of scale—that is, studying issues related to existential threats such as ecological degradation, inequality, and suffering amid landscapes of uncertainty. Such work takes an emotional toll that is rarely acknowledged in anthropological literature. In this article, using our work on plastics as a lens, we ask what anthropologists have to offer that is of real pro…
Plastic politics
The logic of neoliberal environmentalism, which pervades global environmental governance, assumes that consumers’ pro-environmental behavior and choices drive change through the market. The issue of plastic pollution has emerged as a major global environmental challenge in the last decade, and it has not been immune to neoliberal logics. Actors within the plastic industry have long attempted to deflect regulatory attention and public scrutiny by …
Plastic Pollution' and Plastics as Pollution in Mumbai, India
In the last decade, plastic pollution has emerged as a major global issue in public discourse. Nonetheless, there is little consensus on which aspects of plastics constitute the problem. In India, litter, unmanaged disposal, lack of biodegradation, wasteful resource use, threats to bodily integrity and the natural order, and national dishonour are all variously associated with 'plastic pollution'. What exactly, then, does the term reference when …
The Cruel Optimism of Plastics
The plastic problem is a complex, multi-faceted issue that requires coordinated global action and systemic change to address. In this article, we investigate how what we call 'promissory technologies' affect people's capacities to understand the systemic changes necessary to significantly reduce global dependencies upon plastics. Engaging with Lauren Berlant's conceptualizations of 'cruel optimism' and 'technologies of patience' we delineate thre…
The Statistical View Is Not the Moral View
Disposable plastics are ubiquitous in healthcare, where they are associated with hygiene and infection control. In this article, using the case of disposable medical plastics and drawing from autoethnographic and ethnographic fieldwork in South and Southeast Asia, I describe the negotiations and ethical quandaries involved when scales of care clash and dimensions of care are in conflict. Disposable medical plastics form both a materiality of care…
Plastics and labor
Plastics are ubiquitous in the contemporary practice of medicine, where they are tied to notions of hygiene and quality of care. However, when plastics first infiltrated global medical practice, they did so because of considerations related to patient comfort and durability. It was only after developments in the sterilization of plastics and the aggressive marketing of single‐use plastics that medical plastics came to be emblematic of hygiene as …
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Microplastics and Plastic Pollution (8 works) · Law (5 works) · Recycling and Waste Management Techniques (5 works) · Business (4 works) · Economics (4 works) · Environmental ethics (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (4 works)