Anthropological Generations: A Post-Independence Ethnography of Academic Anthropology and Sociology in India

Abstract

This ethnography of three North Indian academic departments from India’s independence in 1947 until 2015 draws on anthropological studies of kinship to examine scholars’ generational relations as a lens on social, institutional, political, and economic processes involved in ethnographic knowledge-making. It finds that these intellectual genealogies should be understood not only as intellectual influence or teacher-student relationships, but also at once as socially produced (and sometimes competing) ideas affecting how scholars conceive of their academic worlds, relate to each other, and navigate or help build their fields and institutions. It then illustrates the significance of this intellectual kinship to how academic cultures are created, how an academic elite is formed, the shaping of disciplinary boundaries, and the workings of world academic hierarchies.