Amita Baviskar
Biographic Data
| ID | 108629 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amita Baviskar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amita |
| FAMILY NAME | Baviskar |
| SIGNATURE | BAVISKAR A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Delhi |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6306-2418 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 444 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Wood for the Trees: Conflicts over Value in a Forest in India
The study of forest-related conflicts in the Global South has largely focused on the struggles of forest-dwelling communities to defend rights to resources being usurped by states, usually acting in concert with private capitalists or elite groups. This article examines how these contestations over value are negotiated when they are institutionalized into legal-bureaucratic procedures of public decision-making. It analyzes the complex, even contr…
Commentary on Guérin and Venkatasubramanian ‘Debt and the Politics of Numbers’
Decolonizing a discipline in distress: Anthropology's pasts, present, and futures in India
India-based anthropologists must contend with the legacies of colonial epistemologies and postcolonial imperatives in an increasingly neoliberal academy and Hindu-supremacist nation-state. For these scholars, anthropology's values of critical humanism are more vital than ever. The challenge is to uphold them in ways that both include and reach beyond the academy. Over the decades, Indian anthropologists' position has shifted with regard to their …
Climate change and agrarian struggles: An invitation to contribute to aJPSForum
This essay introduces and invites contributions to a new Journal of Peasant Studies Forum on 'climate change and critical agrarian studies'. Climate change is inextricably entwined with contemporary capitalism, but how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world requires deeper analysis. In particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change is a vital focus for both thi…
Street food and the art of survival: Migrants and places in Delhi, India
The modernist conception of urban order is predicated on state regulation of city spaces and social practices. Street food vending disrupts this idealized order and is therefore denounced by state officials and the bourgeois public. Hamstrung by this hostile discursive field and their own lack of symbolic capital, how do food vendors manage to maneuver their way through an inhospitable city? In this paper, I use ethnographic vignettes from two ne…
Farmers' protests in India: Introduction to the JPS Forum
Since the summer of 2020, Indian farmers have been protesting three laws that aim to liberalize agricultural markets and encourage contract farming. In doing so, they have also mounted the largest challenge to an authoritarian Hindu nationalist government to date. The contributions to this JPS Forum provide deep and diverse insights into these farmer protests, including their social composition and political character, as well as their roots in l…
Cows, Cars and Cycle-rickshaws: Bourgeois Environmentalists and the Battle for Delhi's Streets
This chapter examines the ongoing emergence of a public sphere on Delhi’s streets, a process in which middle-class concerns about creating social and spatial order have contended with an unruly ‘republic of the streets’. This republic, which accommodates an anarchic assembly of activities by variously situated social groups and individuals, has faced ‘relentless momentum towards [transformation] as a place of passage and traffic’ all else (ibid.)…
Elite and Everyman: The cultural politics of the Indian middle classes
Indian Indigeneities: Adivasi Engagements with Hindu Nationalism in India
This chapter aims to trace adivasi mobilization across three sites: rights to place and natural resources, religious reform, and electoral representation, to examine how discourses of indigeneity are differently constructed and contested across the terrain of class, caste, and citizenship. The articulation between an urban, commercial culture dominated by upper-caste Hindus and the culture of political Hinduism needs to be situated within an olde…
Covid-19 at Home: Gender, Class, and the Domestic Economy in India
amita baviskar and raka rayCOVID-19 at Home: Gender, Class, and the Domestic Economy in India the publIC health response to the CoVId-19 pandemic has thrown into relief the particular significance of "home" as a cultural construct.Ordered to live under "lockdown," as in India, or advised to "stay at home," as in the United States, those of us lucky enough to work from home have experienced a blurring of the social, spatial, and temporal divide be…
Nation’s body, river’s pulse: Narratives of anti-dam politics in India
In the 1990s, social movements against large dams in India were celebrated for crafting a powerful challenge to dominant policies of development. These grounded struggles were acclaimed for their critique of capitalist industrialization and their advocacy for an alternative model of socially just and ecologically sustainable development. Twenty years later, as large dams continue to be built, their critics have shifted the battle off the streets …
Mood
Special Module: Plenary Debate from the Iuaes World Congress 2013: Evolving Humanity, Emerging Worlds, 5-10 August 2013
This module for Involving Anthropology presents an account of one of the plenary debates held at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) World Congress held at Manchester University, 5-10 August 2013. The module begins with a brief introduction to provide the context for the debate, which included two speakers for (Amita Baviskar and Don Nonini) and two speakers against (Helen Kopnina and Veronica Strang) the …
Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty
Special issue: Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 41, Issue 6, 2014: Global Agrarian Transformations, vol. 2: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty
Capítulo 10. Indigeneidades indias: Los compromisos adivasi con el nacionalismo hindú en la India
A fines de 1990, sectores de los adivasi bhilala, miembros de una “tribu clasificada” en el oeste de India, se unieron a la batalla por la supremacía hindú, atacando a los adivasi cristianos y, más tarde, a los musulmanes. Sobre el tapete estaban el indigenismo, la política del lugar y de la pertenencia a la nación india. La afiliación al nacionalismo hindú marcó un cambio radical frente a la política de la década anterior, cuando los adivasi afi…
Indigeneidades contemporáneas: Cultura, Política Y Globalización
Durante los últimos siglos, muchas sociedades tribales han sido aniquiladas por la guerra, la enfermedad, la explotación y la asimilación cultural. Sin embargo, lejos de desaparecer, como alguna vez se vaticinó, los pueblos nativos hoy se muestran fortalecidos e incluso crecen en términos demográficos. Así, los pueblos indígenas han afirmado su lugar en la cultura, la economía y la política mundial del siglo XXI, a pesar de lo heterogéneo de sus …
For a Sociology of India: Satish Saberwal in conversation with Nandini Sundar and Amita Baviskar
As part of an ongoing engagement with the sociology of India, CIS will profile the life and work of senior sociologists. This interview was conducted over three sessions at Professor Saberwal's home, on 6, 11 and 26 August 2008. We also requested Mrs. Edith Saberwal to contribute to the discussion regarding their personal life. The interviews were laced throughout with Professor Saberwal's characteristic humour-which unfortunately, we cannot full…
Pedagogy, Public Sociology and Politics in India: What is to be Done
The current phase of economic liberalization may be understood in terms of a shift in the notion of the nation, especially the shrinking of the public sphere and the increasing exclusion of subaltern groups from public discourse. Disadvantaged groups can only strive for recognition by invoking the fictive ideal of 'community' with moral claims upon the nation-state. The engagement of sociologists in these struggles may entail suppressing critical…
Between Micro-Politics and Administrative Imperatives: Decentralisation and the Watershed Mission in Madhya Pradesh, India
Between violence and desire: Space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi
Vanishing Forests, Sacred Trees: A Hindu Perspective on Eco-Consciousness
This paper examines the coming together of two streams of eco-consciousness among urban middle-class Hindus—one, derived from exposure to a scientific discourse about environmental crisis, and two, drawing upon a repertoire of Hindu beliefs and practices regarding the environment. This intermingling has numerous contradictions arising from the two radically different epistemologies from which these streams flow. Yet they have been knit together c…
Ecology and Development in India: A Field and its Future
L'A. affirme que l'etude de l'influence du developpement sur l'environnement en Inde, constitue un champ de recherche d'avenir. Il examine la place des questions relatives a l'environnement au sein de la sociologie. Il rappelle que la sociologie de l'environnement s'est considerablement developpee dans les annees 1970. Il souligne que le champ de la sociologie de l'environnement, en Inde, doit permettre de mieux evaluer l'impact ecologique de la …
Tribal Politics and Discourses of Environmentalism
In India, state-led developmentalism has recently been challenged by the discourse of environmentalism. Among the various streams of environmentalism, Ecological Marxism has been the most dominant. Its marrying of two concerns-social justice and ecological sustainability-has made this ideology highly appealing to social activists working with tribal communities in western India. Yet closer examination reveals that the dynamics of tribal politics …
In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley
Why are adivasis fighting the Narmada dam and other development projects in India today? Are adivasis 'ecologically noble savages' living in harmony with nature? What is the tribal relationship with nature today? How do people, whose struggles are the subject of theories of liberation and social change, perceive their own situation? Do their present circumstances allow adivasis to formulate a critique of 'development'
Malignant growth: The Sardar Sarovar dam and its impact on public health
Between violence and desire: Space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi
Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty
Special issue: Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 41, Issue 6, 2014: Global Agrarian Transformations, vol. 2: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty
Climate change and agrarian struggles: An invitation to contribute to aJPSForum
This essay introduces and invites contributions to a new Journal of Peasant Studies Forum on 'climate change and critical agrarian studies'. Climate change is inextricably entwined with contemporary capitalism, but how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world requires deeper analysis. In particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change is a vital focus for both thi…
Tribal Politics and Discourses of Environmentalism
In India, state-led developmentalism has recently been challenged by the discourse of environmentalism. Among the various streams of environmentalism, Ecological Marxism has been the most dominant. Its marrying of two concerns-social justice and ecological sustainability-has made this ideology highly appealing to social activists working with tribal communities in western India. Yet closer examination reveals that the dynamics of tribal politics …
Farmers' protests in India: Introduction to the JPS Forum
Since the summer of 2020, Indian farmers have been protesting three laws that aim to liberalize agricultural markets and encourage contract farming. In doing so, they have also mounted the largest challenge to an authoritarian Hindu nationalist government to date. The contributions to this JPS Forum provide deep and diverse insights into these farmer protests, including their social composition and political character, as well as their roots in l…
Nation’s body, river’s pulse: Narratives of anti-dam politics in India
In the 1990s, social movements against large dams in India were celebrated for crafting a powerful challenge to dominant policies of development. These grounded struggles were acclaimed for their critique of capitalist industrialization and their advocacy for an alternative model of socially just and ecologically sustainable development. Twenty years later, as large dams continue to be built, their critics have shifted the battle off the streets …
Between Micro-Politics and Administrative Imperatives: Decentralisation and the Watershed Mission in Madhya Pradesh, India
Vanishing Forests, Sacred Trees: A Hindu Perspective on Eco-Consciousness
This paper examines the coming together of two streams of eco-consciousness among urban middle-class Hindus—one, derived from exposure to a scientific discourse about environmental crisis, and two, drawing upon a repertoire of Hindu beliefs and practices regarding the environment. This intermingling has numerous contradictions arising from the two radically different epistemologies from which these streams flow. Yet they have been knit together c…
Ecology and Development in India: A Field and its Future
L'A. affirme que l'etude de l'influence du developpement sur l'environnement en Inde, constitue un champ de recherche d'avenir. Il examine la place des questions relatives a l'environnement au sein de la sociologie. Il rappelle que la sociologie de l'environnement s'est considerablement developpee dans les annees 1970. Il souligne que le champ de la sociologie de l'environnement, en Inde, doit permettre de mieux evaluer l'impact ecologique de la …
Street food and the art of survival: Migrants and places in Delhi, India
The modernist conception of urban order is predicated on state regulation of city spaces and social practices. Street food vending disrupts this idealized order and is therefore denounced by state officials and the bourgeois public. Hamstrung by this hostile discursive field and their own lack of symbolic capital, how do food vendors manage to maneuver their way through an inhospitable city? In this paper, I use ethnographic vignettes from two ne…
Pedagogy, Public Sociology and Politics in India: What is to be Done
The current phase of economic liberalization may be understood in terms of a shift in the notion of the nation, especially the shrinking of the public sphere and the increasing exclusion of subaltern groups from public discourse. Disadvantaged groups can only strive for recognition by invoking the fictive ideal of 'community' with moral claims upon the nation-state. The engagement of sociologists in these struggles may entail suppressing critical…
Decolonizing a discipline in distress: Anthropology's pasts, present, and futures in India
India-based anthropologists must contend with the legacies of colonial epistemologies and postcolonial imperatives in an increasingly neoliberal academy and Hindu-supremacist nation-state. For these scholars, anthropology's values of critical humanism are more vital than ever. The challenge is to uphold them in ways that both include and reach beyond the academy. Over the decades, Indian anthropologists' position has shifted with regard to their …
Covid-19 at Home: Gender, Class, and the Domestic Economy in India
amita baviskar and raka rayCOVID-19 at Home: Gender, Class, and the Domestic Economy in India the publIC health response to the CoVId-19 pandemic has thrown into relief the particular significance of "home" as a cultural construct.Ordered to live under "lockdown," as in India, or advised to "stay at home," as in the United States, those of us lucky enough to work from home have experienced a blurring of the social, spatial, and temporal divide be…
Special Module: Plenary Debate from the Iuaes World Congress 2013: Evolving Humanity, Emerging Worlds, 5-10 August 2013
This module for Involving Anthropology presents an account of one of the plenary debates held at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) World Congress held at Manchester University, 5-10 August 2013. The module begins with a brief introduction to provide the context for the debate, which included two speakers for (Amita Baviskar and Don Nonini) and two speakers against (Helen Kopnina and Veronica Strang) the …
The Wood for the Trees: Conflicts over Value in a Forest in India
The study of forest-related conflicts in the Global South has largely focused on the struggles of forest-dwelling communities to defend rights to resources being usurped by states, usually acting in concert with private capitalists or elite groups. This article examines how these contestations over value are negotiated when they are institutionalized into legal-bureaucratic procedures of public decision-making. It analyzes the complex, even contr…
Malignant growth: The Sardar Sarovar dam and its impact on public health
Malignant growth: The Sardar Sarovar dam and its impact on public health
In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley
Why are adivasis fighting the Narmada dam and other development projects in India today? Are adivasis 'ecologically noble savages' living in harmony with nature? What is the tribal relationship with nature today? How do people, whose struggles are the subject of theories of liberation and social change, perceive their own situation? Do their present circumstances allow adivasis to formulate a critique of 'development'
Ecology and Development in India: A Field and its Future
L'A. affirme que l'etude de l'influence du developpement sur l'environnement en Inde, constitue un champ de recherche d'avenir. Il examine la place des questions relatives a l'environnement au sein de la sociologie. Il rappelle que la sociologie de l'environnement s'est considerablement developpee dans les annees 1970. Il souligne que le champ de la sociologie de l'environnement, en Inde, doit permettre de mieux evaluer l'impact ecologique de la …
Tribal Politics and Discourses of Environmentalism
In India, state-led developmentalism has recently been challenged by the discourse of environmentalism. Among the various streams of environmentalism, Ecological Marxism has been the most dominant. Its marrying of two concerns-social justice and ecological sustainability-has made this ideology highly appealing to social activists working with tribal communities in western India. Yet closer examination reveals that the dynamics of tribal politics …
Vanishing Forests, Sacred Trees: A Hindu Perspective on Eco-Consciousness
This paper examines the coming together of two streams of eco-consciousness among urban middle-class Hindus—one, derived from exposure to a scientific discourse about environmental crisis, and two, drawing upon a repertoire of Hindu beliefs and practices regarding the environment. This intermingling has numerous contradictions arising from the two radically different epistemologies from which these streams flow. Yet they have been knit together c…
Between violence and desire: Space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi
Between Micro-Politics and Administrative Imperatives: Decentralisation and the Watershed Mission in Madhya Pradesh, India
For a Sociology of India: Satish Saberwal in conversation with Nandini Sundar and Amita Baviskar
As part of an ongoing engagement with the sociology of India, CIS will profile the life and work of senior sociologists. This interview was conducted over three sessions at Professor Saberwal's home, on 6, 11 and 26 August 2008. We also requested Mrs. Edith Saberwal to contribute to the discussion regarding their personal life. The interviews were laced throughout with Professor Saberwal's characteristic humour-which unfortunately, we cannot full…
Pedagogy, Public Sociology and Politics in India: What is to be Done
The current phase of economic liberalization may be understood in terms of a shift in the notion of the nation, especially the shrinking of the public sphere and the increasing exclusion of subaltern groups from public discourse. Disadvantaged groups can only strive for recognition by invoking the fictive ideal of 'community' with moral claims upon the nation-state. The engagement of sociologists in these struggles may entail suppressing critical…
Capítulo 10. Indigeneidades indias: Los compromisos adivasi con el nacionalismo hindú en la India
A fines de 1990, sectores de los adivasi bhilala, miembros de una “tribu clasificada” en el oeste de India, se unieron a la batalla por la supremacía hindú, atacando a los adivasi cristianos y, más tarde, a los musulmanes. Sobre el tapete estaban el indigenismo, la política del lugar y de la pertenencia a la nación india. La afiliación al nacionalismo hindú marcó un cambio radical frente a la política de la década anterior, cuando los adivasi afi…
Indigeneidades contemporáneas: Cultura, Política Y Globalización
Durante los últimos siglos, muchas sociedades tribales han sido aniquiladas por la guerra, la enfermedad, la explotación y la asimilación cultural. Sin embargo, lejos de desaparecer, como alguna vez se vaticinó, los pueblos nativos hoy se muestran fortalecidos e incluso crecen en términos demográficos. Así, los pueblos indígenas han afirmado su lugar en la cultura, la economía y la política mundial del siglo XXI, a pesar de lo heterogéneo de sus …
Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty
Special issue: Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 41, Issue 6, 2014: Global Agrarian Transformations, vol. 2: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty
Special Module: Plenary Debate from the Iuaes World Congress 2013: Evolving Humanity, Emerging Worlds, 5-10 August 2013
This module for Involving Anthropology presents an account of one of the plenary debates held at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) World Congress held at Manchester University, 5-10 August 2013. The module begins with a brief introduction to provide the context for the debate, which included two speakers for (Amita Baviskar and Don Nonini) and two speakers against (Helen Kopnina and Veronica Strang) the …
Mood
Nation’s body, river’s pulse: Narratives of anti-dam politics in India
In the 1990s, social movements against large dams in India were celebrated for crafting a powerful challenge to dominant policies of development. These grounded struggles were acclaimed for their critique of capitalist industrialization and their advocacy for an alternative model of socially just and ecologically sustainable development. Twenty years later, as large dams continue to be built, their critics have shifted the battle off the streets …
Cows, Cars and Cycle-rickshaws: Bourgeois Environmentalists and the Battle for Delhi's Streets
This chapter examines the ongoing emergence of a public sphere on Delhi’s streets, a process in which middle-class concerns about creating social and spatial order have contended with an unruly ‘republic of the streets’. This republic, which accommodates an anarchic assembly of activities by variously situated social groups and individuals, has faced ‘relentless momentum towards [transformation] as a place of passage and traffic’ all else (ibid.)…
Elite and Everyman: The cultural politics of the Indian middle classes
Indian Indigeneities: Adivasi Engagements with Hindu Nationalism in India
This chapter aims to trace adivasi mobilization across three sites: rights to place and natural resources, religious reform, and electoral representation, to examine how discourses of indigeneity are differently constructed and contested across the terrain of class, caste, and citizenship. The articulation between an urban, commercial culture dominated by upper-caste Hindus and the culture of political Hinduism needs to be situated within an olde…
Covid-19 at Home: Gender, Class, and the Domestic Economy in India
amita baviskar and raka rayCOVID-19 at Home: Gender, Class, and the Domestic Economy in India the publIC health response to the CoVId-19 pandemic has thrown into relief the particular significance of "home" as a cultural construct.Ordered to live under "lockdown," as in India, or advised to "stay at home," as in the United States, those of us lucky enough to work from home have experienced a blurring of the social, spatial, and temporal divide be…
Street food and the art of survival: Migrants and places in Delhi, India
The modernist conception of urban order is predicated on state regulation of city spaces and social practices. Street food vending disrupts this idealized order and is therefore denounced by state officials and the bourgeois public. Hamstrung by this hostile discursive field and their own lack of symbolic capital, how do food vendors manage to maneuver their way through an inhospitable city? In this paper, I use ethnographic vignettes from two ne…
Farmers' protests in India: Introduction to the JPS Forum
Since the summer of 2020, Indian farmers have been protesting three laws that aim to liberalize agricultural markets and encourage contract farming. In doing so, they have also mounted the largest challenge to an authoritarian Hindu nationalist government to date. The contributions to this JPS Forum provide deep and diverse insights into these farmer protests, including their social composition and political character, as well as their roots in l…
Climate change and agrarian struggles: An invitation to contribute to aJPSForum
This essay introduces and invites contributions to a new Journal of Peasant Studies Forum on 'climate change and critical agrarian studies'. Climate change is inextricably entwined with contemporary capitalism, but how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world requires deeper analysis. In particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change is a vital focus for both thi…
Decolonizing a discipline in distress: Anthropology's pasts, present, and futures in India
India-based anthropologists must contend with the legacies of colonial epistemologies and postcolonial imperatives in an increasingly neoliberal academy and Hindu-supremacist nation-state. For these scholars, anthropology's values of critical humanism are more vital than ever. The challenge is to uphold them in ways that both include and reach beyond the academy. Over the decades, Indian anthropologists' position has shifted with regard to their …
Commentary on Guérin and Venkatasubramanian ‘Debt and the Politics of Numbers’
The Wood for the Trees: Conflicts over Value in a Forest in India
The study of forest-related conflicts in the Global South has largely focused on the struggles of forest-dwelling communities to defend rights to resources being usurped by states, usually acting in concert with private capitalists or elite groups. This article examines how these contestations over value are negotiated when they are institutionalized into legal-bureaucratic procedures of public decision-making. It analyzes the complex, even contr…
Political science (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Law (12 works) · Geography (10 works) · Political economy (8 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (7 works) · Economics (7 works) · Environmental ethics (6 works)