D N Gellner

Biographic Data

ID21031
NAMED N Gellner
GIVEN NAMESD N
FAMILY NAMEGellner
SIGNATUREGELLNER D N
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Oxford
ORCID0000-0001-5152-1680
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS79
TOTAL CITATIONS243
AUTHOR COUNT78
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1970
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX9

  • Mandir vs Mandal in 2024: Are there limits to the BJP’s social engineering

    Open AccessShashank Chaturvedi, D N Gellner et al.ARTICLEContemporary South Asia2026References: 20

    The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has achieved unprecedented success in three successive Indian general elections. However, in 2024, despite winning, in conjunction with its allies, the highest number of seats and staying in power at the center, the party experienced a considerable setback, which was a surprise to almost everyone. This paper explores the difficulties that the BJP experienced in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and contrasts UP with Gujarat, whe…

  • John K Locke, Buddhist Monasteries of Nepal: A survey of the Bāhās and Bahīs of the Kathmandu Valley

    Open AccessD N GellnerARTICLEEuropean Bulletin of Himalayan…2024

    The UNESCO World Heritage sites of the Kathmandu Valley give pride of place to the temples and palaces at the symbolic heart of the three formerly royal cities: Kathmandu itself, Patan and Bhaktapur. What gives these ancient Newar cities their character, however, is not just the royal centres but the rabbit warren of lanes and courtyards that make up the rest of the urban fabric. Among these many courtyards, set back from the streets and crossroa…

  • The 2022 State Elections in Uttar Pradesh and the RSS-isation of the BJP

    Open AccessShashank Chaturvedi, D N Gellner et al.ARTICLESouth Asia Journal of South Asian…2024Cited by: 1

    Since 2014, the BJP has become increasingly dominant in Uttar Pradesh, India, a state where, as recently as 2012, its vote share had slumped to 15 percent. This paper examines, through ethnographic field research with party workers and others, the reasons for the turnaround in the party’s fortunes. A large part of the answer lies in the increasing strength of BJP party organisation, modelled on an RSS template, as well as the increasing coordinat…

  • The Persistence of Hierarchy: Paradoxes of Dominance in Nepal and Beyond

    Open AccessD N GellnerARTICLESociological Bulletin2024Cited by: 2References: 18

    MN Srinivas’ concept of ‘the dominant caste’ has rightly been highly influential. The forms that dominance takes have changed a good deal since his day, but inequality and hierarchy have persisted. Modern ideological justifications of dominance are frequently at variance with those of former times, leading to plenty of paradoxes. These paradoxes are illustrated with examples from Nepal, but their application is much wider. Thanks to Nepal’s diffe…

  • Sacrifice as pervasive metaphor and creative principle: On Marie Lecomte-Tilouine’s Sacrifice et Violence

    Open AccessD N GellnerARTICLEEuropean Bulletin of Himalayan…2023

    In a sense this is the book Marie Lecomte-Tilouine has been waiting all her career to write. Invited as an honoured guest on her very first visit to Nepal to see the bloody sacrifices of Dasain, confronted with sacrificial practices everywhere she went over the following decades of field research, it is a subject she has written on in many contexts already (as well as co-editing the important comparative collection, Clbrer le pouvoir: Dasain, une…

  • The spaces of religion: A view from South Asia★

    Open AccessD N GellnerARTICLEJournal of the Royal Anthropologica…2023Cited by: 2References: 55

    Anthropologists have spilt much ink deconstructing concepts inherited from the Enlightenment. Religion, possibly the most misleading such concept, has proved highly resistant to the acid of cross-cultural comparison. Debates about the nature of religion go back to sociocultural anthropology's beginnings as a discipline and beyond. Proposed definitions have been numerous, but none has come close to universal acceptance, mainly because conventional…

  • The Last Hindu King: How Nepal Desanctified Its Monarchy

    D N GellnerCHAPTERSacred Kingship in World History2022

  • Re-Creating Anthropology: Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination

    D N Gellner, Dolores P MartinezBOOKRe-Creating Anthropology2022

  • Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence

    Jan Assmann, Nicole Brisch et al.BOOKSacred Kingship in World History2022

    Sacred kingship has been the core political form, in small-scale societies and in vast empires, for much of world history. This collaborative and interdisciplinary book recasts the relationship between religion and politics by exploring this institution in long-term and global comparative perspective

  • Allen, Nicholas J. (1939–2020)

    Open AccessD N GellnerOTHERThe International Encyclopedia of…2021

    N. J. Allen's main contributions to anthropology were in the fields of kinship theory, the history of anthropology, comparative Indo‐European mythology, and the ethnography of eastern Nepal and the Tibetan cultural area. He is known for his theory of the origin of kinship in quadripartite structures. In Indo‐European comparativism he is known for his reworking of Dumézil's three functions by the addition of a fourth sacred pole, which can have bo…

  • Tribute to Nick (N. J.) Allen, 1939–2020

    D N GellnerARTICLEReligions of South Asia2021References: 2

    Photo 1. Nick Allen in

  • N.J. Allen (1939–2020), Indo‐european Comparativist

    Open AccessD N GellnerARTICLEAnthropology Today2020

  • Guarding the Guards: Education, Corruption, and Nepal’s Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (Ciaa)

    Open AccessD N Gellner, K P AdhikariARTICLEPublic Anthropologist2020

    With development, democratization, and market reforms, corruption has become pervasive in Nepal, especially in areas where government licencing is required. Medical education is a site of considerable political and public contention, because of the nexus that links politicians, educational entrepreneurs, and the licencing of medical colleges. The case of Lokman Singh Karki, the notorious chief of the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of A…

  • The nation‐state, class, digital divides and social anthropology

    Open AccessD N GellnerARTICLESocial Anthropology2020

  • Morality is fundamentally an evolved solution to problems of social co-operation

    Open AccessD N Gellner, Oliver Scott Curry et al.ARTICLEJournal of the Royal Anthropologica…2020Cited by: 3References: 22

    This debate took place at the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference in Oxford on 21 September 2018, following the model of the Group Debates in Anthropological Theory at the University of Manchester (GDAT). It brought together and into confrontation two of anthropology's relatively new sub-fields (new at least in their current incarnations), namely evolutionary anthropology and the anthropology of morality and/or ethics. Although…

  • Politics in Gorakhpur since the 1920s: The making of a safe ‘Hindu’ constituency

    Open AccessShashank Chaturvedi, D N Gellner et al.ARTICLEContemporary South Asia2019Cited by: 3References: 16

    The city of Gorakhpur presents what may be a unique, and is certainly an unusual, configuration of religion and politics. The sitting MP from 1998 to 2017, Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk, had one of the safest seats in India and won five parliamentary elections in a row, a career that culminated in his appointment as the BJP Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 2017. Adityanath was both an effective constituency MP and the head of a thriving Math (H…

  • Masters of hybridity: How activists reconstructed Nepali society

    Open AccessD N GellnerARTICLEJournal of the Royal Anthropologica…2019Cited by: 6References: 46

    This article discusses the changes that activists have brought to Nepali society in relation to two key elements of Bruno Latour's actor-network theory (ANT): (1) its account of modernity and (2) its radical downplaying of human agency. ANT, contrary to the way it tends to be understood, deserves to be seen, at least in Latour's treatment, as a major theory of modernity. As such, it is important and enlightening, even though its attack on human a…

  • Sheldon Pollock and Max Weber: Why Pollock is more Weberian than he thinks11I thank D.P. Martinez, S. Collins, P. Szántó, R.F. Gombrich, R. O’Hanlon, D. Acharya, T.T. Lewis, C. Emmrich, S. Whimster, P…

    D N GellnerARTICLEMax Weber Studies2017

  • Afterword

    D N GellnerARTICLEAsian journal of social science2017

    In reflecting on the contributions to this collection, the afterword outlines three ways of understanding violence—direct physical force, structural violence and cultural or symbolic violence—and relates these to Steven Lukes’ three faces of power. It revisits Weber’s definition of the modern state as claiming a monopoly of the legitimate use of the first kind of violence, and contrasts that with the ways in which the actual practice of South Asi…

  • Source Force

    D N Gellner, Amanda SnellingerARTICLESouth Asia Journal of South Asian…2017Cited by: 1

  • Sheldon Pollock and Max Weber: Why Pollock is more Weberian than he thinks

    D N GellnerARTICLEMax Weber Studies2017Cited by: 1

    Sheldon Pollock is the leading North American Indologist and his magnum opus, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, is a field-defining classic. Pollock takes himself to be a fierce critic of Max Weber, but in fact his comparative historical approach shares much with Weber, and where it is wanting would have benefited from more, not less, Weberian influence. Pollock’s vision of language his…

  • Afterword: So What Is the Anthropology of Buddhism About

    Open AccessD N GellnerARTICLEReligion and Society2017References: 15

    It is simultaneously flattering and alarming to be represented as having written a key synthesis on the anthropology of Buddhism 27 years ago. 1 The alarm arises not just from the passage of time but mainly from the fact-pointed out by Erick White in his contribution to this special section-that somehow the anthropology of Buddhism lost momentum shortly after that paper was written. Consequently, subsequent anthropology of Buddhism, White argues,…

  • Shrines and Identities in Britain's Nepali Diaspora

    D N Gellner, Sondra L Hausner et al.ARTICLEDiaspora A Journal of Transnational…2016Cited by: 1References: 11

    This article examines the tension between publicly affirmed religious identification and private religious practice among Britain's Nepali diaspora population. It compares census and survey figures for religious affiliation with religious shrines in people's homes. In some cases there is complete congruence between religious affiliation and home worship (most strikingly in the cases of Sherpas, whose affiliation and shrines are unequivocally Budd…

  • New Identity Politics and the 2012 Collapse of Nepal's Constituent Assembly: When the dominant becomes 'other

    Open AccessK P Adhikari, D N GellnerARTICLEModern Asian Studies2016Cited by: 25References: 15

    This article explores the politicization of ethnicity in Nepal since 1990. In particular it looks at how ideas of indigeneity have become increasingly powerful, leading to Nepal becoming the first and-to date-only Asian country to have signed International Labour Organization Convention number 169 (hereafter ILO 169). The rise of ethnic politics, and in particular the reactive rise of a new kind of ethnicity on the part of the 'dominant' groups-B…

  • Buddhism

    Open AccessD N Gellner, Richard GombrichCHAPTERInternational Encyclopedia of the…2015