T Middleton
Biographic Data
| ID | 31413 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Middleton |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Middleton |
| SIGNATURE | MIDDLETON T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1439-5678 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 181 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
On Political Anxiety
What might anthropology tell us about the politics of anxiety now loosed upon the world? Offering some provisional answers to this question, this article tracks the political anxieties that move through Gorkhaland. The Gorkhaland movement is a periodically violent struggle for a separate state in India for the Gorkhas of the Darjeeling-Kalimpong Hills. Yet after three devastating subnationalist agitations, Gorkhaland does not exist. Not yet. This…
Introduction
Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared
Introduction
Life in the RemainsAs dawn breaks over Darjeeling's cinchona plantations, a young man ambles across the lawn of a dilapidated colonial bungalow-a wooden mallet in one hand, a smartphone in the other.Bundled up against the Himalayan chill, he saunters to a bell hanging at the terrace's edge, waiting to ring in a new day.Below, the rooftops of villages tucked into stands of cinchona trees poke up from the mist.He stares into his phone, an incandesc…
Nilamber Chhetri, The Politics of Ethnic Renewal in Darjeeling
Connective Insecurities
This article rethinks the relationship between connectivity and security through an ethnography of India's notorious Siliguri Corridor - the 'Chicken's Neck'. This narrow stretch of territory funnels myriad goods and bodies between India's 'mainland', its North-East, and beyond to China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Southeast Asia. Pipelines, railways, smugglers, migrants, and militants all pass through this tight space. Vital yet vulne…
Chokepoints
This article develops an anthropology of chokepoints: sites that constrict or 'choke' the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends. We argue that an ethnographic and analytical focus on chokepoints - ports, canals, tunnels, pipelines, transit corridors, and more - recasts longstanding anthropological concerns with the character and consequences of global circulation or 'flow'. Chokepoints, we argue, are zon…
Becoming-After
This article explores the aftermath of quinine in India. Derived from cinchona, the fever tree, quinine was once malaria's only remedy-and, as such, vital to colonial power. But it has left grave uncertainty in its wake. Today, little market exists for Indian quinine, but government cinchona plantations established by the British remain in Darjeeling. What will become of these dilapidated plantations and their 50,000 inhabitants is unclear. Crumb…
Provincialising Bengal
Written against the backdrop of Darjeeling’s 2017 Gorkhaland agitation, this essay chronicles the colonialisations—first British, now Bengali—that undergird this subnationalist struggle. The analysis challenges romanticised views of Darjeeling, presenting instead a case study of internal colonialism. As an exercise in post-colonial thought, it leverages the view from Darjeeling to explore a notable lacuna in our reckonings of subalternity. A plac…
The Afterlives of a Killing
Assassinations are an unsettling feature of South Asian politics. Haunting the body politic in spectacular and spectral forms, these deaths have an uncanny way of transforming political life. This article turns attention to the afterlives of these killings in order to explore the semiotic and sociopolitical technologies through which assassinations—and public killings of other kinds—take life. Introducing nekros/thanatos as the necrotic equivalen…
Coming to terms
Research assistants have long been central to ethnographic practice, yet the conventions of academic labor have left their roles under-stated and obscure. The implications, we opine, are both theoretical and practical. Writing research assistants back in to our collective considerations of the method does more than simply fill a lacuna in the 'reflexive turn'. It opens windows onto a radically transformed field of ethnographic practice. Today, th…
Dynamic duos
This article brings anthropologist and research assistant into mutually reflective critique of one another, the researcher-assistant dynamic, and the challenges of fieldwork in contemporary India. The authors have worked together in the politically charged, ethnologically saturated context of 'tribal' Darjeeling since 2006. To realize the potential of their partnership, Middleton and Pradhan were forced to come to creative terms with the problema…
States of difference
Scheduling tribes
Venturing into an ethnography of government anthropologists themselves, this article interrogates the bureaucratic inner workings and actual agents of today's "ethnographic state." By engaging with the civil servants who verify India's Scheduled Tribes, I explore the politics of "tribal" recognition from the inside out. This perspective lends timely insight into the logistical, political, and epistemological difficulties integral to the functioni…
Anxious Belongings
Across South Asia and beyond, the politics of belonging continue to breed alarming volatility and violence. The embodied, affective dimensions of these politics remain an imminent concern. In this article, I question how anxiety informs these reckonings of who belongs and who does not. Capable of galvanizing bodies and the greater body politic, anxieties over national belonging remain a powerful, but less understood, political force. In Darjeelin…
Commentary
Chokepoints
This article develops an anthropology of chokepoints: sites that constrict or 'choke' the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends. We argue that an ethnographic and analytical focus on chokepoints - ports, canals, tunnels, pipelines, transit corridors, and more - recasts longstanding anthropological concerns with the character and consequences of global circulation or 'flow'. Chokepoints, we argue, are zon…
Coming to terms
Research assistants have long been central to ethnographic practice, yet the conventions of academic labor have left their roles under-stated and obscure. The implications, we opine, are both theoretical and practical. Writing research assistants back in to our collective considerations of the method does more than simply fill a lacuna in the 'reflexive turn'. It opens windows onto a radically transformed field of ethnographic practice. Today, th…
Anxious Belongings
Across South Asia and beyond, the politics of belonging continue to breed alarming volatility and violence. The embodied, affective dimensions of these politics remain an imminent concern. In this article, I question how anxiety informs these reckonings of who belongs and who does not. Capable of galvanizing bodies and the greater body politic, anxieties over national belonging remain a powerful, but less understood, political force. In Darjeelin…
Dynamic duos
This article brings anthropologist and research assistant into mutually reflective critique of one another, the researcher-assistant dynamic, and the challenges of fieldwork in contemporary India. The authors have worked together in the politically charged, ethnologically saturated context of 'tribal' Darjeeling since 2006. To realize the potential of their partnership, Middleton and Pradhan were forced to come to creative terms with the problema…
Connective Insecurities
This article rethinks the relationship between connectivity and security through an ethnography of India's notorious Siliguri Corridor - the 'Chicken's Neck'. This narrow stretch of territory funnels myriad goods and bodies between India's 'mainland', its North-East, and beyond to China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Southeast Asia. Pipelines, railways, smugglers, migrants, and militants all pass through this tight space. Vital yet vulne…
States of difference
Scheduling tribes
Venturing into an ethnography of government anthropologists themselves, this article interrogates the bureaucratic inner workings and actual agents of today's "ethnographic state." By engaging with the civil servants who verify India's Scheduled Tribes, I explore the politics of "tribal" recognition from the inside out. This perspective lends timely insight into the logistical, political, and epistemological difficulties integral to the functioni…
Becoming-After
This article explores the aftermath of quinine in India. Derived from cinchona, the fever tree, quinine was once malaria's only remedy-and, as such, vital to colonial power. But it has left grave uncertainty in its wake. Today, little market exists for Indian quinine, but government cinchona plantations established by the British remain in Darjeeling. What will become of these dilapidated plantations and their 50,000 inhabitants is unclear. Crumb…
Provincialising Bengal
Written against the backdrop of Darjeeling’s 2017 Gorkhaland agitation, this essay chronicles the colonialisations—first British, now Bengali—that undergird this subnationalist struggle. The analysis challenges romanticised views of Darjeeling, presenting instead a case study of internal colonialism. As an exercise in post-colonial thought, it leverages the view from Darjeeling to explore a notable lacuna in our reckonings of subalternity. A plac…
Commentary
States of difference
Scheduling tribes
Venturing into an ethnography of government anthropologists themselves, this article interrogates the bureaucratic inner workings and actual agents of today's "ethnographic state." By engaging with the civil servants who verify India's Scheduled Tribes, I explore the politics of "tribal" recognition from the inside out. This perspective lends timely insight into the logistical, political, and epistemological difficulties integral to the functioni…
Anxious Belongings
Across South Asia and beyond, the politics of belonging continue to breed alarming volatility and violence. The embodied, affective dimensions of these politics remain an imminent concern. In this article, I question how anxiety informs these reckonings of who belongs and who does not. Capable of galvanizing bodies and the greater body politic, anxieties over national belonging remain a powerful, but less understood, political force. In Darjeelin…
Coming to terms
Research assistants have long been central to ethnographic practice, yet the conventions of academic labor have left their roles under-stated and obscure. The implications, we opine, are both theoretical and practical. Writing research assistants back in to our collective considerations of the method does more than simply fill a lacuna in the 'reflexive turn'. It opens windows onto a radically transformed field of ethnographic practice. Today, th…
Dynamic duos
This article brings anthropologist and research assistant into mutually reflective critique of one another, the researcher-assistant dynamic, and the challenges of fieldwork in contemporary India. The authors have worked together in the politically charged, ethnologically saturated context of 'tribal' Darjeeling since 2006. To realize the potential of their partnership, Middleton and Pradhan were forced to come to creative terms with the problema…
The Afterlives of a Killing
Assassinations are an unsettling feature of South Asian politics. Haunting the body politic in spectacular and spectral forms, these deaths have an uncanny way of transforming political life. This article turns attention to the afterlives of these killings in order to explore the semiotic and sociopolitical technologies through which assassinations—and public killings of other kinds—take life. Introducing nekros/thanatos as the necrotic equivalen…
Provincialising Bengal
Written against the backdrop of Darjeeling’s 2017 Gorkhaland agitation, this essay chronicles the colonialisations—first British, now Bengali—that undergird this subnationalist struggle. The analysis challenges romanticised views of Darjeeling, presenting instead a case study of internal colonialism. As an exercise in post-colonial thought, it leverages the view from Darjeeling to explore a notable lacuna in our reckonings of subalternity. A plac…
Becoming-After
This article explores the aftermath of quinine in India. Derived from cinchona, the fever tree, quinine was once malaria's only remedy-and, as such, vital to colonial power. But it has left grave uncertainty in its wake. Today, little market exists for Indian quinine, but government cinchona plantations established by the British remain in Darjeeling. What will become of these dilapidated plantations and their 50,000 inhabitants is unclear. Crumb…
Connective Insecurities
This article rethinks the relationship between connectivity and security through an ethnography of India's notorious Siliguri Corridor - the 'Chicken's Neck'. This narrow stretch of territory funnels myriad goods and bodies between India's 'mainland', its North-East, and beyond to China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Southeast Asia. Pipelines, railways, smugglers, migrants, and militants all pass through this tight space. Vital yet vulne…
Chokepoints
This article develops an anthropology of chokepoints: sites that constrict or 'choke' the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends. We argue that an ethnographic and analytical focus on chokepoints - ports, canals, tunnels, pipelines, transit corridors, and more - recasts longstanding anthropological concerns with the character and consequences of global circulation or 'flow'. Chokepoints, we argue, are zon…
Introduction
Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared
Introduction
Life in the RemainsAs dawn breaks over Darjeeling's cinchona plantations, a young man ambles across the lawn of a dilapidated colonial bungalow-a wooden mallet in one hand, a smartphone in the other.Bundled up against the Himalayan chill, he saunters to a bell hanging at the terrace's edge, waiting to ring in a new day.Below, the rooftops of villages tucked into stands of cinchona trees poke up from the mist.He stares into his phone, an incandesc…
Nilamber Chhetri, The Politics of Ethnic Renewal in Darjeeling
On Political Anxiety
What might anthropology tell us about the politics of anxiety now loosed upon the world? Offering some provisional answers to this question, this article tracks the political anxieties that move through Gorkhaland. The Gorkhaland movement is a periodically violent struggle for a separate state in India for the Gorkhas of the Darjeeling-Kalimpong Hills. Yet after three devastating subnationalist agitations, Gorkhaland does not exist. Not yet. This…
Sociology (11 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (10 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Politics (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Ethnography (6 works) · History (6 works) · Gender Studies (5 works)