Akhil Gupta
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 90146 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Akhil Gupta |
| NOMBRES | Akhil |
| APELLIDO | Gupta |
| FIRMA | GUPTA A |
| AFILIACIONES | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3751-1600 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 59 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 3762 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 56 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 4 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1977 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 17 |
Inclusionary and Exclusionary Preferences
Exclusionary social policies take a significant toll on the mental and physical health of targeted groups. Support for specific exclusionary policies does not always align with general antipathy towards the targeted group, however. Does support for specific exclusionary policies rely on particular thought processes (i.e., cognitive mechanisms)? Does opposition? We investigate these questions through the lens of “bathroom laws” across two studies.…
Discipline and Practice
Affective Sovereignties
Anthropological Locations
Berdamai dengan Keterbatasan Epistemologis
Following the proliferation of digital media usage, the world has seen an increasing amount of digitally-mediated lives in everyday contexts. While anthropological scholarship has started to address this ever-growing subject, anthropologists are mainly preoccupied with human engagements in virtual worlds that have their own tangible and embodied sense of spatiality (e.g., online role-playing and gaming communities). In so doing, anthropologists h…
Decolonizing US anthropology
After Ferguson, Standing Rock, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the crisis of refugees at the US southern border, there have been renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology. Dissatisfaction on the domestic front runs parallel to an unease over US anthropology's failure to adequately address militarism, imperialism, and predatory capitalism abroad. Finally, there is the fraught question of US anthropology's oversized influence wit…
Feeling Climate Change
Culture, Power, Place
Red Tape
The missed period
Business process outsourcing (BPO) industries providing customer service are characterized by three features: the product of labor is affect; affect is central to the labor process; and affect constitutes a crucial modality for the workers' subject formation. This affective labor is distinctive in that workers' connections to their customers are live, transnational, and interactive. Such BPOs constitute a form of capitalist production in which pr…
On politics and precarity in academia
The terror of the neoliberal markets and the terror of politics both threaten academic freedom - sometimes subtly, sometimes more openly. In this Forum, we ask our contributors to reflect on the entanglements between economy and politics and how they contribute to the ongoing precaritisation in academia, how they shape individual researchers' biographies and how they influence academic research. But more importantly, beyond analysis, this Forum a…
The Promise of Infrastructure
Infrastructural time / Hannah Appel -- The future in ruins : thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure / Akhil Gupta -- Infrastructures in and out of time : the promise of roads in contemporary Peru / Penny Harvey -- The current never stops : intimacies of energy infrastructure in Vietnam / Christina Schwenkel -- Infrastructure, apartheid technopolitics, and temporalities of "transition" / Antina von Schnitzler -- A public matter : water, hyd…
The Future in Ruins
Promise of Infrastructure
Rethinking the Anthropology of Corruption
In our introduction to this special issue, we take stock of where the anthropological literature on corruption has come and where it might go next. Our goal is neither to provide an exhaustive literature review nor to summarize the papers gathered together in this issue. Rather, we aim to identify especially promising areas in need of more focused research and analytic attention and to articulate pressing questions within those areas. Toward that…
Changing Forms of Corruption in India
This article has four important goals. First, I want to ask why liberalization and market-friendly reforms failed to curb corruption in India. Indeed, confounding the predictions of most proponents of reform, corruption seems to have increased after the neoliberal reforms of 1991. Second, I aim to develop a typology in which the importance of particular sectors to corrupt practices is highlighted and explained. Third, I point out that India has f…
Future tense
Since its beginning in 2000, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has grown to employ 700,000 young people in India. These workers spend their nights interacting by phone and online with customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere. In this article, we focus on the affective dimensions of work in this industry. BPOs have led to contradictory outcomes such as upward mobility accompanied by precarity. Our …
Intimate Encounters
By examining the affective regimes generated by call center workers in Bangalore, the authors argue that the forms of alienation and intimacy they generate are coimplicated, rather than in opposition, to each other. In contesting the presumption that the intimate is in contradistinction to the public, the authors join scholarly conversations that trace how relations of intimacy are constructed through processes of labor. This analysis of intimate…
Paradoxical Infrastructures
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
An Anthropology of Electricity from the Global South
I worked at EPRI both before and after my anthropological fieldwork in an Indian village
"State, corruption, postcoloniality
Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State," by Akhil Gupta, first appeared in print in 1995 in the pages of American Ethnologist. It went on to become one of the most important and influential articles of recent decades. We talked with Akhil Gupta about how the argument put forward in "Blurred Boundaries" came to be. Our conversation touched on the background of the article and the difficulti…
Authorship, research assistants and the ethnographic field
This rich special issue opens up a large set of questions about authorship that goes well beyond the question of research assistants in the field.I will first explore this issue, and then attempt to position the question of research assistants in a wider 'field'.I will argue that Middleton and Cons (and their contributors) are quite right to focus on research assistants in the field, because the neglect of this topic leaves a large gap in anthrop…
Messy bureaucracies
Comment on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press
Structural violence and politics
In Red Tape, I do not use the term "arbitrary" in opposition to "systematic", as is alleged by Harriss and Jeffrey. Arbitrariness accompanies systematic forms of discrimination, and is the result of both, the indifference to outcomes and to the chaotic style of functioning of Indian bureaucracies. Interpreting structural violence, or explaining injustice, requires understanding what the state means to different people. The chief argument that pov…
Red Tape
Spatializing States
In this exploratory article, we ask how states come to be understood as entities with particular spatial characteristics, and how changing relations between practices of government and national territories may be challenging long-established modes of state spatiality. In the first part of this article, we seek to identify two principles that are key to state spatialization: vertically (the state is "above"society) and encompassment (the state "en…
Blurred Boundaries
In this article I attempt to do an ethnography of the state by examining the discourses of corruption in contemporary India. I focus on the practices of lower levels of the bureaucracy in a small north Indian town as well as on representations of the state in the mass media. Research on translocal institutions such as "the state" enables us to reflect on the limitations of participant-observation as a technique of fieldwork. The analysis leads me…
Anthropological Locations
Postcolonial Developments
Main road leading into Alipur, with the village pond to the right conversation while I turned the tape around, and then we launched into the discussion, parts of which are reproduced below.Like other places in northwest India, Alipur had witnessed a drastic transformation in agricultural practices after the introduction of the "green revolution," in which use of hybrid, high-yielding seeds had resulted in a fourfold increase in India's wheat outp…
Discipline and Practice
Paradoxical Infrastructures
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
Globalization and Postcolonial States
This article examines the complex relationship between globalization and the postcolonial state. Challenging the simplistic narrative of the state's decline in the face of globalization, the authors argue that globalization has actually reshaped and reconstituted the state's power in new and often contradictory ways. They explore how postcolonial states engage with global processes, sometimes resisting, sometimes accommodating, and sometimes acti…
The Song of the Nonaligned World
contingent form of organizing space in world. National identity appears to be firmly spatialized and seemingly immutable, becoming almost a natural marker of cultural and social difference. This article problematizes nationalism by juxtaposing it and other forms of spatial commitment and identity, particularly transnational ones. In so doing, it seeks to illuminate specificity of nationalism in postcolonial world. Beginning with premise that stru…
Red Tape
An Anthropology of Electricity from the Global South
I worked at EPRI both before and after my anthropological fieldwork in an Indian village
Narratives of corruption
In this article I attempt to analyze stories about corruption for what they might reveal about the Indian state. By triangulating my own fieldwork data, a prize-winning novel written by an official of the Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) state government, and the accounts of corruption by one of the major social anthropologists of India, F.G. Bailey, I claim that narratives of corruption, and the actions of bureaucrats and agencies in relation to those narra…
Decolonizing US anthropology
After Ferguson, Standing Rock, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the crisis of refugees at the US southern border, there have been renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology. Dissatisfaction on the domestic front runs parallel to an unease over US anthropology's failure to adequately address militarism, imperialism, and predatory capitalism abroad. Finally, there is the fraught question of US anthropology's oversized influence wit…
Rethinking the Anthropology of Corruption
In our introduction to this special issue, we take stock of where the anthropological literature on corruption has come and where it might go next. Our goal is neither to provide an exhaustive literature review nor to summarize the papers gathered together in this issue. Rather, we aim to identify especially promising areas in need of more focused research and analytic attention and to articulate pressing questions within those areas. Toward that…
Intimate Encounters
By examining the affective regimes generated by call center workers in Bangalore, the authors argue that the forms of alienation and intimacy they generate are coimplicated, rather than in opposition, to each other. In contesting the presumption that the intimate is in contradistinction to the public, the authors join scholarly conversations that trace how relations of intimacy are constructed through processes of labor. This analysis of intimate…
Authorship, research assistants and the ethnographic field
This rich special issue opens up a large set of questions about authorship that goes well beyond the question of research assistants in the field.I will first explore this issue, and then attempt to position the question of research assistants in a wider 'field'.I will argue that Middleton and Cons (and their contributors) are quite right to focus on research assistants in the field, because the neglect of this topic leaves a large gap in anthrop…
Future tense
Since its beginning in 2000, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has grown to employ 700,000 young people in India. These workers spend their nights interacting by phone and online with customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere. In this article, we focus on the affective dimensions of work in this industry. BPOs have led to contradictory outcomes such as upward mobility accompanied by precarity. Our …
Reliving Childhood? The Temporality of Childhood and Narratives of Reincarnation
Although less well known than the Tibetan search for high lamas, cases of reincarnation reported from other parts of the world frequently involve very young children. What does this imply for our understanding of childhood? Reincarnated children are inhabited by their (adult) thoughts and gestures, and clearly have to be conceptualized as more complex beings than is allowed by the standard narrative of childhood which posits a new being who slowl…
Culture, Power, Place
Changing Forms of Corruption in India
This article has four important goals. First, I want to ask why liberalization and market-friendly reforms failed to curb corruption in India. Indeed, confounding the predictions of most proponents of reform, corruption seems to have increased after the neoliberal reforms of 1991. Second, I aim to develop a typology in which the importance of particular sectors to corrupt practices is highlighted and explained. Third, I point out that India has f…
Messy bureaucracies
Comment on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press
The Reincarnation of Souls and the Rebirth of Commodities
n 1984-85, while doing fieldwork in a small village in northern India that I will call Alipur, I found myself the subject of an unlikely story. At that time, I didn't know quite what to make of it (I still don't), but it proved to be both profoundly unsettling and curiously affecting. The story was told by a young girl who was not quite three years old, perhaps even closer to being two. She was the youngest of four children of a relatively well-t…
"Más allá de la "cultura
Este artigo argumenta que a cultura tem sido utilizada como uma chave explicativa para uma ampla gama de problemas sociais e políticos, obscurecendo frequentemente mais do que ilumina. Os autores propõem deslocar o foco da "cultura" para o "espaço", argumentando que a identidade é produzida através de conexões espaciais e que a política da diferença é frequentemente uma luta pelo controle do espaço. Examina como as reivindicações de identidade sã…
On politics and precarity in academia
The terror of the neoliberal markets and the terror of politics both threaten academic freedom - sometimes subtly, sometimes more openly. In this Forum, we ask our contributors to reflect on the entanglements between economy and politics and how they contribute to the ongoing precaritisation in academia, how they shape individual researchers' biographies and how they influence academic research. But more importantly, beyond analysis, this Forum a…
"State, corruption, postcoloniality
Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State," by Akhil Gupta, first appeared in print in 1995 in the pages of American Ethnologist. It went on to become one of the most important and influential articles of recent decades. We talked with Akhil Gupta about how the argument put forward in "Blurred Boundaries" came to be. Our conversation touched on the background of the article and the difficulti…
The Political Economy of Post-Independence India—A Review Article
Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely po…
Anthropological Locations
Discipline and Practice
Revolution in Telengana 1946–1951 (Part One)
Research Article| May 01 1984 Revolution in Telengana 1946–1951 (Part One) Akhil Gupta Akhil Gupta Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (1984) 4 (1): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1215/07323867-4-1-1 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Akhil Gupta; Revolution in Telengana 1946–1951 (Part One). Comparative Studies of South Asia, Afri…
Revolution in Telengana (1946–1951)
The Political Economy of Post-Independence India—A Review Article
Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely po…
Beyond “Culture”
The Reincarnation of Souls and the Rebirth of Commodities
n 1984-85, while doing fieldwork in a small village in northern India that I will call Alipur, I found myself the subject of an unlikely story. At that time, I didn't know quite what to make of it (I still don't), but it proved to be both profoundly unsettling and curiously affecting. The story was told by a young girl who was not quite three years old, perhaps even closer to being two. She was the youngest of four children of a relatively well-t…
The Song of the Nonaligned World
contingent form of organizing space in world. National identity appears to be firmly spatialized and seemingly immutable, becoming almost a natural marker of cultural and social difference. This article problematizes nationalism by juxtaposing it and other forms of spatial commitment and identity, particularly transnational ones. In so doing, it seeks to illuminate specificity of nationalism in postcolonial world. Beginning with premise that stru…
Blurred Boundaries
In this article I attempt to do an ethnography of the state by examining the discourses of corruption in contemporary India. I focus on the practices of lower levels of the bureaucracy in a small north Indian town as well as on representations of the state in the mass media. Research on translocal institutions such as "the state" enables us to reflect on the limitations of participant-observation as a technique of fieldwork. The analysis leads me…
Culture, Power, Place
Culture, Power, Place
Postcolonial Developments
Main road leading into Alipur, with the village pond to the right conversation while I turned the tape around, and then we launched into the discussion, parts of which are reproduced below.Like other places in northwest India, Alipur had witnessed a drastic transformation in agricultural practices after the introduction of the "green revolution," in which use of hybrid, high-yielding seeds had resulted in a fourfold increase in India's wheat outp…
Culture/Power/Place
Culture/Power/Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. AKHIL GUPTA and JAMES FERGUSON, eds. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997; 361 pp. In our relentless search for theoretical guidance in understanding culture, the central conceptual cornerstone of our discipline, cultural anthropologists have long looked to other analytic realms and disciplines for insight. By counterpoising to ecology, personality, history, or now, power and we have t…
Anthropological Locations
This collection defines an array of key issues to consider in deepening our understanding of what we might call disciplinary practices. The volume fixes its sights (sites?) on faultlines in existing constructions of field, weaknesses that have become evident as our interests have shifted with changes in the world and the academy- The separate chapters are, for the most part, critical and reflexive rather than ethnographic. They draw their conclus…
Hybridity in an Arid Field
Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in Making of Modern AKHIL GUPTA. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1998; xv + 409 pp. By any standards Postcolonial developments is a remarkable achievement. A critical and original contribution to ethnography of Indian subcontinent and of Third World peasantries more generally, it also decisively shifts ground on which some key battles in both anthropology and international environmental politics are fought…
Anthropological Locations
Among social sciences, anthropology relies most fundamentally on fieldwork--the long-term immersion in another way of life as basis for knowledge. In an era when anthropologists are studying topics that resist geographical localization, this book initiates a long-overdue discussion of political and epistemological implications of disciplinary commitment to fieldwork. These innovative, stimulating essays--carefully chosen to form a coherent whole-…
Culture, Power, Place
Governing Population
History, Rule, Representation Scattered Speculations on of Revelation and Revolution, Volume Ii
The second volume of John and Jean Comaroff's RR delivers a complex and richly nuanced analysis of the complexities of colonial domination. In my response I focus on three topics in particular: on processes of historical causation and notions of temporality; on processes of governmentality; and on the possibilities of self-reflexivity in how colonial encounters are represented. The section on historical causation focuses on the relationship betwe…
Reliving Childhood? The Temporality of Childhood and Narratives of Reincarnation
Although less well known than the Tibetan search for high lamas, cases of reincarnation reported from other parts of the world frequently involve very young children. What does this imply for our understanding of childhood? Reincarnated children are inhabited by their (adult) thoughts and gestures, and clearly have to be conceptualized as more complex beings than is allowed by the standard narrative of childhood which posits a new being who slowl…
Spatializing States
In this exploratory article, we ask how states come to be understood as entities with particular spatial characteristics, and how changing relations between practices of government and national territories may be challenging long-established modes of state spatiality. In the first part of this article, we seek to identify two principles that are key to state spatialization: vertically (the state is "above"society) and encompassment (the state "en…
Narratives of corruption
In this article I attempt to analyze stories about corruption for what they might reveal about the Indian state. By triangulating my own fieldwork data, a prize-winning novel written by an official of the Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) state government, and the accounts of corruption by one of the major social anthropologists of India, F.G. Bailey, I claim that narratives of corruption, and the actions of bureaucrats and agencies in relation to those narra…
Globalization and Postcolonial States
This article examines the complex relationship between globalization and the postcolonial state. Challenging the simplistic narrative of the state's decline in the face of globalization, the authors argue that globalization has actually reshaped and reconstituted the state's power in new and often contradictory ways. They explore how postcolonial states engage with global processes, sometimes resisting, sometimes accommodating, and sometimes acti…
"Más allá de la "cultura
Este artigo argumenta que a cultura tem sido utilizada como uma chave explicativa para uma ampla gama de problemas sociais e políticos, obscurecendo frequentemente mais do que ilumina. Os autores propõem deslocar o foco da "cultura" para o "espaço", argumentando que a identidade é produzida através de conexões espaciais e que a política da diferença é frequentemente uma luta pelo controle do espaço. Examina como as reivindicações de identidade sã…
National Poverty and Global Poverty in the Age of Neoliberalism
Extreme poverty continues to be a major problem in contemporary India despite the fact that the poor are included in democratic politics and national sovereignty. I argue that Agamben’s concept of homo sacer better allows us to understand the fate of the poor, who can be killed without sacrifice, than Foucault’s idea of biopower. However, in recent years, the focus on poverty as a national phenomenon has been replaced with the idea of “global pov…
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