J Copeman
Biographic Data
| ID | 11499 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Copeman |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Copeman |
| SIGNATURE | COPEMAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6967-0086 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 208 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Guru Logics after Artificial Intelligence
AI-mediated forms of guruship are proliferating across South Asia and beyond, yet they have scarcely begun to receive sustained scholarly attention. This article takes their emergence as an occasion to revisit the conceptual vocabulary through which guruship has been understood, asking what becomes of ‘guru logics’ after artificial intelligence. AI gurus are not merely technological curiosities; nor are they straightforward successors to human gu…
Blood
Blood is a polyvalent substance. Its dual nature as a vital physical entity and a potent symbolic medium makes it indispensable to medicine but also to ritual practice, symbolism, and popular thought. Blood has long been studied by anthropologists as a defining metaphor for idioms of kinship, nationalism, and race, as well as ritual contexts, such as blood sacrifice and menstruation taboos. In recent decades, anthropologists have increasingly foc…
Authenticity, Legitimacy and the Transglobal Yoga Industry: A Sociological Analysis of Shanti Mandir’, by Patrick S. D. McCartney
Authenticity, Legitimacy and the Transglobal Yoga Industry: A Sociological Analysis of Shanti Mandir, by Patrick S. D. McCartney. Abingdon: Routledge, 2025. 262 pp., £145 (hb), £38 (ebook). ISBN 9781032762357 (hb), 9781003477662 (ebook)
Portrait: Susan Bayly
“Enemies Within”. Hindu Nationalism, Crypto-conversion, and the Crematory Re-disciplining of the Non-religious Subject in Punjab (India)
This article examines Hindu nationalist responses to organised rationalist critique in Punjab, India. Drawing on ethnographic material including early correspondence and testimonies, it traces how Hindutva groups have sought to contain the Tarksheel movement through legal harassment coupled with threats of purificatory violence. Rather than treating rationalists as external opponents, Hindu nationalists frame them as “enemies within”: figures who…
Blood
On ‘Singh’ and ‘Kaur’: Names, caste, gender and Sikh disidentity politics
Kaur’ and ‘Singh’ reconsidered: Fashion, gender, bureaucracy, ownership and Sikh names in circulation
Mass Castration', Mechanical Devotion? Slavery, Surgery and As-If Devotion in a North Indian Guru Movement
This essay examines mass castration allegations within the North Indian guru movement Dera Sacha Sauda. Drawing on court records, public commentary, and prior fieldwork, it traces how surgical procedures served as a mechanism of enforced proximity and devotional binding. Castration here functions less as renunciation than as anatomical control within a system of engineered devotion that sutures followers into machinic forms of loyalty. The essay …
Dons réels et potentiels: Critique Et Relations De Don Fantômes
Ce qui est donné peut être évalué par rapport à ce qui aurait pu être donné mais ne l'a pas été. Le thème central de cet essai est ce que nous appelons la relation de don fantôme, afin de montrer combien ces dons qui n'ont pas été, à la fois présent et non présent, viennent hanter et déstabiliser les dons effectifs. Nous explorons comment cette relation peut constituer la base de la critique sociale. Cet essai définit ainsi une sorte de « garder …
Science as Other than Itself: Strategic Anti-essentialism and Keeping-While-Disposing among Indian Rationalists
India's rationalists work toward the disposal of attitudes they consider to be unscientific and to promote respect for and understanding of scientific evidence. Rationalists tend to see the relationship between science and religion as zero-sum: there is a fundamental disjuncture between science-arrogated to themselves-and religious mentalities. Figures like religious gurus have embraced certain scientific techniques-for example, chemistry methods…
Introduction. An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange
Dialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how…
Clarification and Disposal as Key Concepts in the Anthropology of Nonreligion
This article outlines a conceptual dyad that maps onto a widespread preoccupation with the untangling and elimination of religious traces among avowedly nonreligious people: clarification and disposal. Clarification denotes the reworking of morality, ceremonial conduct, and artistic expression as endeavors that are essentially human or cultural and therefore only incidental to religious traditions. Disposal refers to practices that aim to remove …
Hindu Nationalism, Gurus and Media
This commentary offers a reflection on the triangular interactive relationship between Hindutva, gurus and media. It suggests that Hindu nationalists understand gurus to be a specific form of valued Hindu cultural good, which helps to explain mediatised activist attempts to defend gurus from legal and media scrutiny, and historicises the theme of guru domination, caste politics and Hindutva through the optics of matter and media, exploring both t…
Actual and potential gifts: Critique, shadow gift relations and the virtual domain of the ungiven
What is given may be evaluated in relation to what might have been given but was not. The central thematic of this essay is what we term the shadow gift relation (as distinct from the more standard anthropological gift relation among exchange partner dyads) between the gift that is given and that which remains ungiven-with the latter, both present and not present, coming to haunt and unsettle the former. The potential of the gift is key for it is…
Hindutva's Blood
In this article we examine blood as a medium and metaphor for Hindutva’s political transactions. Specifically, we identify three ways in which blood operates in Hindutva thought and practice. First, it serves to create a spatial geographic whole – an original Hindu nation whose inhabitants share the same blood. Second, blood serves to mediate between the violent and non-violent aspects of Hindu nationalism, authorizing and reconciling present act…
Awakening Hindu nationalism through yoga: Swami Ramdev and the Bharat Swabhiman movement
Alongside Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose politics he explicitly endorses, Swami Ramdev is frequently depicted as the contemporary face of neo-Hindutva nationalism in India. This essay concerns specific, but interrelated, aspects of the Swami Ramdev ‘phenomenon’ and their particular relation to Hindu nationalism. We bracket the headline-stealing anti-Islamic and pro-Modi proclamations in order to focus on the nuances of the relationship betwe…
Hematologies: The Political Life of Blood in India
In this ground-breaking account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India, Jacob Copeman and Dwaipayan Banerjee examine how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. Hematologies traces how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities, and activist practices. Using examples from anti-colonial appeals to blood sacrifice as a political philosophy to contempora…
The absence of the divineRejoinder to Willerslev, Rane, and Christian Suhr. 2018. “Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation.” Hau: Journal…
Rejoinder to Willerslev, Rane , and Christian Suhr . 2018. “Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation.” Hau : Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 65–78
Blood
Anthropological consideration of blood had until the 1990s mainly focused on its deployment as an idiom of kinship, nationalism, and race and on descriptions of its use in ritual contexts. By the 2000s, anthropologists had become increasingly interested in social practices centering on blood outside of the body: blood donation and transfusion, blood tests, blood spilled as a form of political protest or for artistic purposes, and so on. But the e…
Ungiven: Philanthropy as critique
Drawing on field research principally from contexts of medical blood donation in North India, this article describes how gifts that are given often critique-by obviation-those that remain ungiven: the care not provided by the Indian state for Bhopal survivors, the family members unwilling to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. In this way, giving can come to look like a form of criticism. The critiques that acts of g…
Godless People and Dead Bodies: Materiality and the Morality of Atheist Materialism
Books Available for Review
Books available for review
Books available for review
The Gift and Its Forms of Life in Contemporary India
This paper seeks to document and interpret some of the many life forms of the gift ofdanin contemporary India. It attempts to be both summative in reflecting on the recent extremely productive literature ondanand programmatic in identifying emergent themes and instances ofdanthat require more detailed analysis at present and in the future. The paper focuses in particular on highly public forms ofdan, and examines the relationship betweendanand mo…
Introduction: Blood Donation, Bioeconomy, Culture
Veinglory: Exploring Processes of Blood Transfer Between Persons
This article examines processes involved in blood donation and 'blood management' in an anthropological light. It claims that blood management is not restricted to the procedures that medical professionals employ on blood outside of bodies, but that 'management' practice is enforced by donors themselves onto their own internal bodily processes. It suggests that donation and transfusion centre on issues of time-management and production; concepts …
Gathering Points: Blood Donation and the Scenography of `National Integration' in India
This article explores nationalist interpretations of blood donation activity, examining how some Indians read integrative messages into the practical procedures through which blood is donated and distributed. The first post-Independence Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed the need for `national integration' as a bulwark against a myriad of linguistic, caste and ethnic agitations that threatened to disrupt the unity of the newly …
Violence, non-violence, and blood donation in India
This article explores the relationship between medical blood donation and concepts and enactments of violence and non-violence in India. The focus is on those north Indian devotional orders in thesanttradition whose devotees donate their blood in large quantities for transfusion. These orders profess a commitment to the Hindu Brahmanic and reformist tenet of non-violence (ahimsa). At the same time, their attempts to donate blood for Indian army p…
The didactic death: Publicity, instruction, and body donation
What value does death acquire when body organs are pledged for transplantation? Deaths may be made public by a stated desire to donate, and a matter of public debate precisely because the desire is denied. This essay explores two case studies from India of attempts to donate organs: one of a condemned prisoner, and the other of a former Marxist chief minister of West Bengal. One of these attempts was idealized and exalted, the other thwarted; bot…
Blood Will Have Blood: A Study in Indian Political Ritual
This article considers the significance of the incorporation of blood donation as a widespread feature of commemorative political rituals in India. It places the rituals in the context of the current campaign in India to replace paid with non-remunerated donation, and explains how this campaign has led to the circulation of a store of ethical capital that the ritual organizers endeavor—through these blood-shedding commemorations—to capture for po…
Social Theory after Strathern: An Introduction
Taking its cue from the articles in this special issue, this introduction explores what value a critical engagement with Strathern's work might have for the social sciences by setting such an engagement in motion. It argues that Strathern's writings are a particularly fruitful starting point for reflecting on our assumptions about what exactly theory might be and how and where it may be made to travel. Through the juxtaposition of articles publis…
The art of bleeding: Memory, Martyrdom, and Portraits in Blood
This essay investigates the genre of the Indian blood painting, in which human blood is utilized as a medium of representation. It focuses, in particular, on the political and memorial functions of this kind of painting. Such paintings, often using the artist's own blood, frequently depict 'freedom fighters' (orshaheed) who perished in the Indian struggle for Independence, and are intended to reawaken memories among the public of forgotten martyr…
Guru logics
This commentary highlights the diversity of thematics and conceptual schema generated by guru-ship, and its capacity-as a set of principles as much as specific persons-to participate in, and move between, multiple social and conceptual domains. The aim is to reassess some of the key existing literature on guru-ship while developing a kind of analytical toolkit in order to aid future studies and stimulate new thought on the phenomenon. The guru, w…
Awakening Hindu nationalism through yoga: Swami Ramdev and the Bharat Swabhiman movement
Alongside Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose politics he explicitly endorses, Swami Ramdev is frequently depicted as the contemporary face of neo-Hindutva nationalism in India. This essay concerns specific, but interrelated, aspects of the Swami Ramdev ‘phenomenon’ and their particular relation to Hindu nationalism. We bracket the headline-stealing anti-Islamic and pro-Modi proclamations in order to focus on the nuances of the relationship betwe…
The Image after Strathern: Art and Persuasive Relationality in India's Sanguinary Politics
Publicly-enacted blood extractions (principally blood donation events and petitions or paintings in blood) in mass Indian political contexts (for instance, protest or political memorial events and election rallies) are a noteworthy present-day form of political enunciation in India, for such extractions - made to speak as and on behalf of political subject positions - are intensely communicative. Somewhat akin to the transformative fasts undertak…
Secularism's Names: Commitment to Confusion and the Pedagogy of the Name
This essay takes up social and political questions of naming that are often ignored in studies of inequality or exclusion. What if South Asian personal names ceased to reveal demographic 'data' about their bearers, scrambling any attempt at automatic categorization? The focus here is on naming and/or renaming for ideological reasons, and in such ways that the identity of the bearer is deliberately blurred. Grounded in ethnographic work amongst co…
South Asian tissue economies
This introduction surveys existing literature on South Asian tissue economies and reflects on engagements with diverse modes of biological exchange in the subcontinent. It elaborates the aims and themes of this special issue, which presents essays on caste, gender, and blood donation in Pakistan (Mumtaz and Levay), DNA testing amongst a former Untouchable community in south India (Egorova) and amongst diasporic Indians in Houston, Texas (Reddy), …
Ungiven: Philanthropy as critique
Drawing on field research principally from contexts of medical blood donation in North India, this article describes how gifts that are given often critique-by obviation-those that remain ungiven: the care not provided by the Indian state for Bhopal survivors, the family members unwilling to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. In this way, giving can come to look like a form of criticism. The critiques that acts of g…
Actual and potential gifts: Critique, shadow gift relations and the virtual domain of the ungiven
What is given may be evaluated in relation to what might have been given but was not. The central thematic of this essay is what we term the shadow gift relation (as distinct from the more standard anthropological gift relation among exchange partner dyads) between the gift that is given and that which remains ungiven-with the latter, both present and not present, coming to haunt and unsettle the former. The potential of the gift is key for it is…
Hindutva's Blood
In this article we examine blood as a medium and metaphor for Hindutva’s political transactions. Specifically, we identify three ways in which blood operates in Hindutva thought and practice. First, it serves to create a spatial geographic whole – an original Hindu nation whose inhabitants share the same blood. Second, blood serves to mediate between the violent and non-violent aspects of Hindu nationalism, authorizing and reconciling present act…
Hindu Nationalism, Gurus and Media
This commentary offers a reflection on the triangular interactive relationship between Hindutva, gurus and media. It suggests that Hindu nationalists understand gurus to be a specific form of valued Hindu cultural good, which helps to explain mediatised activist attempts to defend gurus from legal and media scrutiny, and historicises the theme of guru domination, caste politics and Hindutva through the optics of matter and media, exploring both t…
Clarification and Disposal as Key Concepts in the Anthropology of Nonreligion
This article outlines a conceptual dyad that maps onto a widespread preoccupation with the untangling and elimination of religious traces among avowedly nonreligious people: clarification and disposal. Clarification denotes the reworking of morality, ceremonial conduct, and artistic expression as endeavors that are essentially human or cultural and therefore only incidental to religious traditions. Disposal refers to practices that aim to remove …
Excessifs dons de sang: Dévotion et ascétisme en Inde
En Inde, l'interdiction en 1998 des dons rémunérés a exigé des stratégies innovatrices de la part des banques de sang et des autres établissements de santé afin d'augmenter le nombre des dons de sang bénévoles. Jusqu'à présent, les campagnes n'ont pas été particulièrement fructueuses. Il existe cependant des cas de succès exemplaires : depuis quelques années, les mouvements religieux, en particulier ceux dirigés par des gourous, sont devenus des …
Blood Will Have Blood: A Study in Indian Political Ritual
This article considers the significance of the incorporation of blood donation as a widespread feature of commemorative political rituals in India. It places the rituals in the context of the current campaign in India to replace paid with non-remunerated donation, and explains how this campaign has led to the circulation of a store of ethical capital that the ritual organizers endeavor—through these blood-shedding commemorations—to capture for po…
Veinglory: Exploring Processes of Blood Transfer Between Persons
This article examines processes involved in blood donation and 'blood management' in an anthropological light. It claims that blood management is not restricted to the procedures that medical professionals employ on blood outside of bodies, but that 'management' practice is enforced by donors themselves onto their own internal bodily processes. It suggests that donation and transfusion centre on issues of time-management and production; concepts …
Cadaver Donation as Ascetic Practice in India
This article explores emerging ascetic orientations toward utility and death in India. It chronicles the activities of an innovative organization that campaigns for cadaver donations for the purposes of organ retrieval and dissection by trainee doctors. This would entail dispensing with cremation, a mode of cadaver disposal newly characterized as wasteful. In order to counter 'cremation-lack', the asceticism of cadaver donation is accentuated by …
Veins of Devotion: Blood Donation and Religious Experience in North India
Violence, non-violence, and blood donation in India
This article explores the relationship between medical blood donation and concepts and enactments of violence and non-violence in India. The focus is on those north Indian devotional orders in thesanttradition whose devotees donate their blood in large quantities for transfusion. These orders profess a commitment to the Hindu Brahmanic and reformist tenet of non-violence (ahimsa). At the same time, their attempts to donate blood for Indian army p…
Gathering Points: Blood Donation and the Scenography of `National Integration' in India
This article explores nationalist interpretations of blood donation activity, examining how some Indians read integrative messages into the practical procedures through which blood is donated and distributed. The first post-Independence Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed the need for `national integration' as a bulwark against a myriad of linguistic, caste and ethnic agitations that threatened to disrupt the unity of the newly …
Introduction: Blood Donation, Bioeconomy, Culture
Excessifs dons de sang: Dévotion et ascétisme en Inde
En Inde, l'interdiction en 1998 des dons rémunérés a exigé des stratégies innovatrices de la part des banques de sang et des autres établissements de santé afin d'augmenter le nombre des dons de sang bénévoles. Jusqu'à présent, les campagnes n'ont pas été particulièrement fructueuses. Il existe cependant des cas de succès exemplaires : depuis quelques années, les mouvements religieux, en particulier ceux dirigés par des gourous, sont devenus des …
The Gift and Its Forms of Life in Contemporary India
This paper seeks to document and interpret some of the many life forms of the gift ofdanin contemporary India. It attempts to be both summative in reflecting on the recent extremely productive literature ondanand programmatic in identifying emergent themes and instances ofdanthat require more detailed analysis at present and in the future. The paper focuses in particular on highly public forms ofdan, and examines the relationship betweendanand mo…
Les enjeux du don de sang dans le monde
The guru in South Asia new interdisciplinary perspectives: New interdisciplinary perspectives
This book provides a set of fresh and compelling interdisciplinary approaches to the enduring phenomenon of the guru in South Asia. Moving across different gurus and kinds of gurus, and between past and present, the chapters call attention to the extraordinary scope and richness of the social lives and roles of South Asian gurus. Prevailing scholarship has rightly considered the guru to be a source of religious and philosophical knowledge and mys…
The didactic death: Publicity, instruction, and body donation
What value does death acquire when body organs are pledged for transplantation? Deaths may be made public by a stated desire to donate, and a matter of public debate precisely because the desire is denied. This essay explores two case studies from India of attempts to donate organs: one of a condemned prisoner, and the other of a former Marxist chief minister of West Bengal. One of these attempts was idealized and exalted, the other thwarted; bot…
Guru logics
This commentary highlights the diversity of thematics and conceptual schema generated by guru-ship, and its capacity-as a set of principles as much as specific persons-to participate in, and move between, multiple social and conceptual domains. The aim is to reassess some of the key existing literature on guru-ship while developing a kind of analytical toolkit in order to aid future studies and stimulate new thought on the phenomenon. The guru, w…
The Art of Bleeding: Memory, Martyrdom, and Portraits in Blood
The patriotic art that the author explores in this chapter depicts martyrs revered for having shed their blood. These portraits speak to a very contemporary set of concerns to do with memory and forgetting. The chapter offers a consideration of India's sanguinary politics by focusing principally on its artistic aspects. The portraits in blood produced by the Shaheed Smriti Chetna Samiti share features with the wider sanguinary politics concerning…
Portraits of substance: Image, text and intervention in India's sanguinary politics
This essay examines the way extractions of human blood – for medical donations, portrait paintings, and petitions – have come to form a significant means of political communication (particularly as a means of political protest) throughout India, focusing in particular on a case study from the south of a karate teacher and artist who, through painting multiple portraits of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister with his blood, sought land for his karate sc…
South Asian tissue economies
This introduction surveys existing literature on South Asian tissue economies and reflects on engagements with diverse modes of biological exchange in the subcontinent. It elaborates the aims and themes of this special issue, which presents essays on caste, gender, and blood donation in Pakistan (Mumtaz and Levay), DNA testing amongst a former Untouchable community in south India (Egorova) and amongst diasporic Indians in Houston, Texas (Reddy), …
The art of bleeding: Memory, Martyrdom, and Portraits in Blood
This essay investigates the genre of the Indian blood painting, in which human blood is utilized as a medium of representation. It focuses, in particular, on the political and memorial functions of this kind of painting. Such paintings, often using the artist's own blood, frequently depict 'freedom fighters' (orshaheed) who perished in the Indian struggle for Independence, and are intended to reawaken memories among the public of forgotten martyr…
Books Available for Review
Books available for review
Social Theory after Strathern: An Introduction
Taking its cue from the articles in this special issue, this introduction explores what value a critical engagement with Strathern's work might have for the social sciences by setting such an engagement in motion. It argues that Strathern's writings are a particularly fruitful starting point for reflecting on our assumptions about what exactly theory might be and how and where it may be made to travel. Through the juxtaposition of articles publis…
The Image after Strathern: Art and Persuasive Relationality in India's Sanguinary Politics
Publicly-enacted blood extractions (principally blood donation events and petitions or paintings in blood) in mass Indian political contexts (for instance, protest or political memorial events and election rallies) are a noteworthy present-day form of political enunciation in India, for such extractions - made to speak as and on behalf of political subject positions - are intensely communicative. Somewhat akin to the transformative fasts undertak…
Godless People and Dead Bodies: Materiality and the Morality of Atheist Materialism
Atheists are not the only people who donate their bodies, yet the practice is strikingly prevalent in a variety of atheist circles. We concentrate here on the Indian case, exploring body donation as a key instance of the material culture of atheism. Recent efforts to reinvigorate study of the material culture of religion are to be welcomed, but they should be extended to non-religion in order to address the irony that sees scholars representing m…
Introduction. On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation
Do names require a context in order to determine who a name refers to or are names the example par excellence for words that do not require a non-linguistic context to be specified? Since Russell’s (1911) classical paper on this theme, proper names have been treated as a test case for theories of reference in philosophical debates. Whereas those in favour of contextualism insist that names are a species of indexicals, the proponents of anti-conte…
Books available for review
Secularism's Names: Commitment to Confusion and the Pedagogy of the Name
This essay takes up social and political questions of naming that are often ignored in studies of inequality or exclusion. What if South Asian personal names ceased to reveal demographic 'data' about their bearers, scrambling any attempt at automatic categorization? The focus here is on naming and/or renaming for ideological reasons, and in such ways that the identity of the bearer is deliberately blurred. Grounded in ethnographic work amongst co…
Anthropological Studies and Insights (33 works) · Political science (30 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · History (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Aesthetics (10 works)