Saiba Varma
Biographic Data
| ID | 3592222 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Saiba Varma |
| GIVEN NAMES | Saiba |
| FAMILY NAME | Varma |
| SIGNATURE | VARMA S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Department of Anthropology, University of California |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1963 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing and Liberation
Decolonizing Bodiesoffers novel theorizations of how racial capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchal violence erode the bodily schema and experiences of racialized and colonized populations, profoundly constraining their being in the world.The book invigorates embodiment studies by centering the experiences and struggles of Black, Indigenous, colonized, disabled, queer, and racialized subjects, showing how they live these displacements and …
We Are Too Anxious: Anthropology and the Decolonial Project
This article probes the presence of what I term “destructive anxiety” in ongoing efforts to transform and decolonize US anthropology. Drawing on Freud's theorizations of anxiety, the article shows how conditions of objective anxiety, such as precarity, militarism, whiteness, and coloniality in anthropology, when unaddressed, can bleed into destructive anxiety. Drawing primarily from an autoethnographic account of a social media controversy, I sho…
Troubling complicities: The anthropologist as (im)moral subject
This creative article seeks to trouble dominant modes of how anthropologists position themselves as moral subjects and grapple with their complicity with/in empire today: what we call "bearing witness" and "denunciation/confession." In contrast to these models, we perform and theorize our own complicities by staying with the multiple social, relational, political, and epistemological entanglements that our fieldwork produces. Through a braided di…
Introduction: Medicine’s shadowside: revisiting clinical iatrogenesis
Drawing on the work of Ivan Illich, our special issue reanimates iatrogenesis as a vital concept for the social sciences of medicine. It calls for medicine to expand its engagement of the injustices that unfold from clinical processes, practices, and protocols into patient lifeworlds and subjectivities beyond the clinic. The capacious view of iatrogenesis revealed by this special issue collection affords fuller and more heterogeneous insights on …
Attending to the Dark Side of Medicine
Geographies of Occupation in South Asia
Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, Ather Zia, Geographies of Occupation in South Asia, Feminist Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2-3, Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts (2019), pp. 574-580
Spectral Ties: Hospital Hauntings Across the Line of Control
In this article, we trace encounters between humans and phantasmic entities in hospitals in Indian-occupied and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In Pakistan, the presence of spectral beings ( jinni ) in hospitals is linked to state and sectarian violence, which precipitates ruptures between jinni and human worlds. Such breaches permit jinni to manifest in the medical present, where insecure actors harness them to ventriloquize unspoken anxieties. In …
Disappearing the asylum: Modernizing psychiatry and generating manpower in India
In recent years, the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH) and the World Health Organization have worked closely with governments across the global South to redress major treatment gaps to improve access to mental health services. In India, recent reforms include transforming public psychiatric institutions from sites of treatment to research and training institutes, known as "Centres of Excellence," to combat acute manpower shortages and mode…
Love in the time of occupation: Reveries, longing, and intoxication in Kashmir
At a drug rehabilitation clinic in Indian-occupied Kashmir, patients were subjected to a range of biomedical and penitentiary techniques. These techniques included group therapy sessions in which substance users performed narratives of their recovery-a practice that made visible their gratitude to the police, which oversaw the clinic and which, as an arm of the Indian military, many view as an illegal occupying force. While patients publicly pled…
Where There are only Doctors: Counselors as Psychiatrists in Indian-Administered Kashmir
In the last decade, over half a dozen local and international humanitarian organizations have established psychosocial programs to ameliorate the suffering of victims of violence in Kashmir. Many promote nonpharmacological trauma healing, such as counseling and psychotherapy, in contrast to the pharmacological treatments preferred by state mental health services. Although anthropologists have critiqued humanitarianism for its inadequate attention…
Africa: A Short History of Africa. By Roland Oliver and J. D. Fage. Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, Middlesex. 1962. 279p. 5s
India and Africa
Disappearing the asylum: Modernizing psychiatry and generating manpower in India
In recent years, the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH) and the World Health Organization have worked closely with governments across the global South to redress major treatment gaps to improve access to mental health services. In India, recent reforms include transforming public psychiatric institutions from sites of treatment to research and training institutes, known as "Centres of Excellence," to combat acute manpower shortages and mode…
Love in the time of occupation: Reveries, longing, and intoxication in Kashmir
At a drug rehabilitation clinic in Indian-occupied Kashmir, patients were subjected to a range of biomedical and penitentiary techniques. These techniques included group therapy sessions in which substance users performed narratives of their recovery-a practice that made visible their gratitude to the police, which oversaw the clinic and which, as an arm of the Indian military, many view as an illegal occupying force. While patients publicly pled…
Where There are only Doctors: Counselors as Psychiatrists in Indian-Administered Kashmir
In the last decade, over half a dozen local and international humanitarian organizations have established psychosocial programs to ameliorate the suffering of victims of violence in Kashmir. Many promote nonpharmacological trauma healing, such as counseling and psychotherapy, in contrast to the pharmacological treatments preferred by state mental health services. Although anthropologists have critiqued humanitarianism for its inadequate attention…
Spectral Ties: Hospital Hauntings Across the Line of Control
In this article, we trace encounters between humans and phantasmic entities in hospitals in Indian-occupied and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In Pakistan, the presence of spectral beings ( jinni ) in hospitals is linked to state and sectarian violence, which precipitates ruptures between jinni and human worlds. Such breaches permit jinni to manifest in the medical present, where insecure actors harness them to ventriloquize unspoken anxieties. In …
Troubling complicities: The anthropologist as (im)moral subject
This creative article seeks to trouble dominant modes of how anthropologists position themselves as moral subjects and grapple with their complicity with/in empire today: what we call "bearing witness" and "denunciation/confession." In contrast to these models, we perform and theorize our own complicities by staying with the multiple social, relational, political, and epistemological entanglements that our fieldwork produces. Through a braided di…
Attending to the Dark Side of Medicine
Geographies of Occupation in South Asia
Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, Ather Zia, Geographies of Occupation in South Asia, Feminist Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2-3, Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts (2019), pp. 574-580
India and Africa
Africa: A Short History of Africa. By Roland Oliver and J. D. Fage. Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, Middlesex. 1962. 279p. 5s
India and Africa
Where There are only Doctors: Counselors as Psychiatrists in Indian-Administered Kashmir
In the last decade, over half a dozen local and international humanitarian organizations have established psychosocial programs to ameliorate the suffering of victims of violence in Kashmir. Many promote nonpharmacological trauma healing, such as counseling and psychotherapy, in contrast to the pharmacological treatments preferred by state mental health services. Although anthropologists have critiqued humanitarianism for its inadequate attention…
Disappearing the asylum: Modernizing psychiatry and generating manpower in India
In recent years, the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH) and the World Health Organization have worked closely with governments across the global South to redress major treatment gaps to improve access to mental health services. In India, recent reforms include transforming public psychiatric institutions from sites of treatment to research and training institutes, known as "Centres of Excellence," to combat acute manpower shortages and mode…
Love in the time of occupation: Reveries, longing, and intoxication in Kashmir
At a drug rehabilitation clinic in Indian-occupied Kashmir, patients were subjected to a range of biomedical and penitentiary techniques. These techniques included group therapy sessions in which substance users performed narratives of their recovery-a practice that made visible their gratitude to the police, which oversaw the clinic and which, as an arm of the Indian military, many view as an illegal occupying force. While patients publicly pled…
Spectral Ties: Hospital Hauntings Across the Line of Control
In this article, we trace encounters between humans and phantasmic entities in hospitals in Indian-occupied and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In Pakistan, the presence of spectral beings ( jinni ) in hospitals is linked to state and sectarian violence, which precipitates ruptures between jinni and human worlds. Such breaches permit jinni to manifest in the medical present, where insecure actors harness them to ventriloquize unspoken anxieties. In …
Attending to the Dark Side of Medicine
Geographies of Occupation in South Asia
Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, Ather Zia, Geographies of Occupation in South Asia, Feminist Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2-3, Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts (2019), pp. 574-580
Introduction: Medicine’s shadowside: revisiting clinical iatrogenesis
Drawing on the work of Ivan Illich, our special issue reanimates iatrogenesis as a vital concept for the social sciences of medicine. It calls for medicine to expand its engagement of the injustices that unfold from clinical processes, practices, and protocols into patient lifeworlds and subjectivities beyond the clinic. The capacious view of iatrogenesis revealed by this special issue collection affords fuller and more heterogeneous insights on …
Troubling complicities: The anthropologist as (im)moral subject
This creative article seeks to trouble dominant modes of how anthropologists position themselves as moral subjects and grapple with their complicity with/in empire today: what we call "bearing witness" and "denunciation/confession." In contrast to these models, we perform and theorize our own complicities by staying with the multiple social, relational, political, and epistemological entanglements that our fieldwork produces. Through a braided di…
Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing and Liberation
Decolonizing Bodiesoffers novel theorizations of how racial capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchal violence erode the bodily schema and experiences of racialized and colonized populations, profoundly constraining their being in the world.The book invigorates embodiment studies by centering the experiences and struggles of Black, Indigenous, colonized, disabled, queer, and racialized subjects, showing how they live these displacements and …
We Are Too Anxious: Anthropology and the Decolonial Project
This article probes the presence of what I term “destructive anxiety” in ongoing efforts to transform and decolonize US anthropology. Drawing on Freud's theorizations of anxiety, the article shows how conditions of objective anxiety, such as precarity, militarism, whiteness, and coloniality in anthropology, when unaddressed, can bleed into destructive anxiety. Drawing primarily from an autoethnographic account of a social media controversy, I sho…
Political science (5 works) · History (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (3 works) · Geography (3 works) · History (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Medicine (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works)