Andrew Willford
Biographic Data
| ID | 539559 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Willford |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Willford |
| SIGNATURE | WILLFORD A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
From institutions to homes
Long-term institutionalization of people with mental health conditions persists globally despite emerging rights-based reforms and a shift towards community-based care. In India, efforts to facilitate community-based alternatives are emerging. This paper evaluates the outcomes of a multi-site implementation of Home Again, a housing with supportive services intervention developed in India, for people with mental health issues who are long-term res…
Modernity and Malevolence in the Psychiatric Clinic
Modernity and Malevolence in the Psychiatric Clinic is a richly detailed ethnographic study of clinical care at NIMHANS, India’s leading mental health institution, offering rich observations of patient-physician interactions alongside interviews with psychiatrists and neurologists. It explores how patterns of psychosocial causation, shaped by modernity's pressures, frame key questions in psychiatric practice. With hundreds of patients visiting NI…
Fleeting Agencies
‘The need for enemies’
From fieldwork among Irula and Alu Kurumba communities within the Nilgiris mountains of South India, this chapter examines increased anxiety and psycho-social symptoms associated with socioeconomic and cultural transformations. Drawing upon F. G. Bailey’s classic work, I argue that the conflicts between value systems associated with Adivasi (indigenous), Hindu, and civil society have become intensified through landscape transformations in recent …
Do You Hear Voices, or Do You Think You Hear Voices?’
Based upon fieldwork at India’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), I trace the contours of hysteria as an enduring, albeit informal, analytic that continues to disturb neuropsychiatric reductionism within psychiatry. I argue that at this historical moment, the political and economic demand for singular identities out of more porous cultural life-worlds (e.g. ethnic, religious, linguistic, occupational) produces clini…
The Future of Bangalore’s Cosmopolitan Pasts
Bangalore is often heralded as India's future-a city where global technologies converge with multinational capital to produce a cosmopolitan workforce and vibrant economic growth. In this narrative the city's main challenge revolves around its success: whether its physical infrastructure can support its burgeoning population. Most observers assume that Bangalore's emergence as a "global city" represents its more complete integration into the worl…
Chapter 4. The Kannada Movement and Tamil Revival
Using a cultural-ecological framework to explore dietary beliefs and practices during pregnancy and lactation among women in Adivasi communities in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, India
This article explores maternal dietary beliefs and practices gathered through interviews with mothers of infants and young children in Adivasi communities in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, India. Guided by focused ethnographic study methods, interviews were conducted with 33 key informants. We used a cultural-ecological framework to analyze and interpret the texts that were elicited from women about dietary beliefs and eating patterns during pre…
Tamils and the Haunting of Justice
Reviewed by: Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia’s Plantations by Andrew C. Willford Carl Vadivella Belle (bio), Charles Hirschman (bio), Edmund Terence Gomez (bio), and Andrew C. Willford (bio) Keywords Malaysia, Tamils, land tenure, relocation, plantation workers, bumiputraism, government policy, communal relations, ethnography, ethno-nationalism, critical theory, ethnography Tamils and the Haunting of Justic…
Tamils and the Haunting of Justice
Tamils and the Haunting of Justice
In 2006, dejected members of the Bukit Jalil Estate community faced eviction from their homes in Kuala Lumpur where they had lived for generations. City officials classified plantation residents as squatters and questioned any right they might have to stay. This story epitomizes the dilemma faced by Malaysian Tamils in recent years as they confront the collapse of the plantation system where they have lived and worked for generations. Foreign wor…
Cage of Freedom
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
From the Margins to Centre Stage
This paper traces senses of injustice among Indian Malaysians which found expression in the ‘illegal’ Hindraf rally in Kuala Lumpur in 2007. While underlying ethnic and racial differentiation has been rendered through law in the post-colonial nation-state, the focus here is on a specific locality: resettlement flats for Indians displaced for the construction of Malaysia’s federal government administrative centre, Putrajaya. Ex-plantation workers …
Clio/Anthropos
Clio/anthropos
The intersection between history and anthropology is more varied now than it has ever been. Historians have increasingly looked to the methodologies of anthropologists to explain inequalities of power, problems of voicelessness, and conceptions of social change from an inside perspective. And ethnologists have increasingly relied on longitudinal visions of their subjects, inquiries framed by the lens of history rather than purely structuralist, c…
History and Anthropology
Cage of Freedom
The "Already Surmounted" yet "Secretly Familiar
Hindu reform-inspired movements and artistic organizations produce a multicultural and multiethnic narrative for Malaysia that simultaneously asserts difference while negating both the state-sponsored and stereotypical boundaries of ethnic demarcation. An exacerbated uncertainty of identity among Indians and Malays, as perceived by elite Indians, produces a struggle for symbolic autonomy or transcendence from the ethnosymbolic ordering of the nat…
Possession and displacement in Kuala Lumpur's ethnic landscape
"Weapons of the Meek"
This article examines the politics of Hindu revivalism among Tamils in Malaysia. In examining the dramatic pilgrimage and ritual of Thaipusam and the activities of a leading Hindu reform and performing arts organization, it is argued that the present resurgence of Hinduism is related to a growing sense of displacement experienced by Tamils in Malaysia. Thaipusam, while representing a collective assertion of Tamil and Hindu identity, also signifie…
"Hierarchy and the "Unmodern
Cage of Freedom
From the Margins to Centre Stage
This paper traces senses of injustice among Indian Malaysians which found expression in the ‘illegal’ Hindraf rally in Kuala Lumpur in 2007. While underlying ethnic and racial differentiation has been rendered through law in the post-colonial nation-state, the focus here is on a specific locality: resettlement flats for Indians displaced for the construction of Malaysia’s federal government administrative centre, Putrajaya. Ex-plantation workers …
The "Already Surmounted" yet "Secretly Familiar
Hindu reform-inspired movements and artistic organizations produce a multicultural and multiethnic narrative for Malaysia that simultaneously asserts difference while negating both the state-sponsored and stereotypical boundaries of ethnic demarcation. An exacerbated uncertainty of identity among Indians and Malays, as perceived by elite Indians, produces a struggle for symbolic autonomy or transcendence from the ethnosymbolic ordering of the nat…
Tamils and the Haunting of Justice
Possession and displacement in Kuala Lumpur's ethnic landscape
Cage of Freedom
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
"Hierarchy and the "Unmodern
"Weapons of the Meek"
This article examines the politics of Hindu revivalism among Tamils in Malaysia. In examining the dramatic pilgrimage and ritual of Thaipusam and the activities of a leading Hindu reform and performing arts organization, it is argued that the present resurgence of Hinduism is related to a growing sense of displacement experienced by Tamils in Malaysia. Thaipusam, while representing a collective assertion of Tamil and Hindu identity, also signifie…
Possession and displacement in Kuala Lumpur's ethnic landscape
Cage of Freedom
The "Already Surmounted" yet "Secretly Familiar
Hindu reform-inspired movements and artistic organizations produce a multicultural and multiethnic narrative for Malaysia that simultaneously asserts difference while negating both the state-sponsored and stereotypical boundaries of ethnic demarcation. An exacerbated uncertainty of identity among Indians and Malays, as perceived by elite Indians, produces a struggle for symbolic autonomy or transcendence from the ethnosymbolic ordering of the nat…
Clio/Anthropos
Clio/anthropos
The intersection between history and anthropology is more varied now than it has ever been. Historians have increasingly looked to the methodologies of anthropologists to explain inequalities of power, problems of voicelessness, and conceptions of social change from an inside perspective. And ethnologists have increasingly relied on longitudinal visions of their subjects, inquiries framed by the lens of history rather than purely structuralist, c…
History and Anthropology
From the Margins to Centre Stage
This paper traces senses of injustice among Indian Malaysians which found expression in the ‘illegal’ Hindraf rally in Kuala Lumpur in 2007. While underlying ethnic and racial differentiation has been rendered through law in the post-colonial nation-state, the focus here is on a specific locality: resettlement flats for Indians displaced for the construction of Malaysia’s federal government administrative centre, Putrajaya. Ex-plantation workers …
Cage of Freedom
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Tamils and the Haunting of Justice
In 2006, dejected members of the Bukit Jalil Estate community faced eviction from their homes in Kuala Lumpur where they had lived for generations. City officials classified plantation residents as squatters and questioned any right they might have to stay. This story epitomizes the dilemma faced by Malaysian Tamils in recent years as they confront the collapse of the plantation system where they have lived and worked for generations. Foreign wor…
Tamils and the Haunting of Justice
Reviewed by: Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia’s Plantations by Andrew C. Willford Carl Vadivella Belle (bio), Charles Hirschman (bio), Edmund Terence Gomez (bio), and Andrew C. Willford (bio) Keywords Malaysia, Tamils, land tenure, relocation, plantation workers, bumiputraism, government policy, communal relations, ethnography, ethno-nationalism, critical theory, ethnography Tamils and the Haunting of Justic…
Tamils and the Haunting of Justice
The Future of Bangalore’s Cosmopolitan Pasts
Bangalore is often heralded as India's future-a city where global technologies converge with multinational capital to produce a cosmopolitan workforce and vibrant economic growth. In this narrative the city's main challenge revolves around its success: whether its physical infrastructure can support its burgeoning population. Most observers assume that Bangalore's emergence as a "global city" represents its more complete integration into the worl…
Chapter 4. The Kannada Movement and Tamil Revival
Using a cultural-ecological framework to explore dietary beliefs and practices during pregnancy and lactation among women in Adivasi communities in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, India
This article explores maternal dietary beliefs and practices gathered through interviews with mothers of infants and young children in Adivasi communities in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, India. Guided by focused ethnographic study methods, interviews were conducted with 33 key informants. We used a cultural-ecological framework to analyze and interpret the texts that were elicited from women about dietary beliefs and eating patterns during pre…
‘The need for enemies’
From fieldwork among Irula and Alu Kurumba communities within the Nilgiris mountains of South India, this chapter examines increased anxiety and psycho-social symptoms associated with socioeconomic and cultural transformations. Drawing upon F. G. Bailey’s classic work, I argue that the conflicts between value systems associated with Adivasi (indigenous), Hindu, and civil society have become intensified through landscape transformations in recent …
Do You Hear Voices, or Do You Think You Hear Voices?’
Based upon fieldwork at India’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), I trace the contours of hysteria as an enduring, albeit informal, analytic that continues to disturb neuropsychiatric reductionism within psychiatry. I argue that at this historical moment, the political and economic demand for singular identities out of more porous cultural life-worlds (e.g. ethnic, religious, linguistic, occupational) produces clini…
Fleeting Agencies
From institutions to homes
Long-term institutionalization of people with mental health conditions persists globally despite emerging rights-based reforms and a shift towards community-based care. In India, efforts to facilitate community-based alternatives are emerging. This paper evaluates the outcomes of a multi-site implementation of Home Again, a housing with supportive services intervention developed in India, for people with mental health issues who are long-term res…
Modernity and Malevolence in the Psychiatric Clinic
Modernity and Malevolence in the Psychiatric Clinic is a richly detailed ethnographic study of clinical care at NIMHANS, India’s leading mental health institution, offering rich observations of patient-physician interactions alongside interviews with psychiatrists and neurologists. It explores how patterns of psychosocial causation, shaped by modernity's pressures, frame key questions in psychiatric practice. With hundreds of patients visiting NI…
Political science (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Socioeconomic Development in Asia (9 works) · Asian Studies and History (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Geography (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works)