David Gellner

• Professor at University of Oxford

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 ar...

Beginning with the 1990s, the subject of caste has seen a profound increase in interest among scholars. What was until then approached as a fossilized tradition of the ritual-obsessed Hindus refusing to see the progressive spirits of the emerging world and studied as a branch of anthropology, suddenly began to be seen as a complex reality deeply em...

Remoteness, as a subject for multi-disciplinary analysis, remains largely under-studied and under-theorised. Though the idea of remote areas is familiar in Nepal, thanks to the government’s long-running ‘Remote Area Development Programme (1966-2017), there has hardly been any conceptual work on the subject in the Nepalese context. We ask who define...

The urban civilization of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley provides a paradigm for the study of caste and Hindu kingship. In this book, six anthropologists, in a genuinely collaborative international endeavour, pool their knowledge of the three ancient Newar cities of Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur, and settlements nearby. The social institut...

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 definiti...

This issue presents summary of findings and policy suggestions on nine small research projects (SWPs), which mainly deal with issues of Dalit concerns at the ground level and attempt to explore local experiences, perspectives, and realities in Nepal. They attempt to address, in one way or another, the changing (or unchanging, as the case may be) ma...

What is education, and who counts as an ‘educated person’, amidst competing to religious, political, and pedagogical ideologies, which have shaped contemporary educational practices and institutions in Nepal? How have social and political changes, an increasing commodification of education, a continued reliance on foreign aid and expanded geographi...

What is education, and who counts as an ‘educated person’, amidst competing to religious, political, and pedagogical ideologies, which have shaped contemporary educational practices and institutions in Nepal? How have social and political changes, an increasing commodification of education, a continued reliance on foreign aid and expanded geographi...

The place of populism in the thought of Ernest Gellner is not immediately obvious. An examination of his writings reveals that it played at least three distinct roles. First, it was a misguided intellectual impulse, leading to many wrong philosophical views, among them the ordinary language philosophy espoused by the followers of the later Wittgens...

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 h...

Abstract Open access- full text here: https://brill.com/view/journals/puan/2/2/article-p177_177.xml?fbclid=IwAR2kUHEeTrgcPFjLXf-FZ7bZb8Lzf53MmWAkm0lt-pjxKW0Mn9gUOlEmJbQ&body=fullHtml-33150 With development, democratization, and market reforms, corruption has become pervasive in Nepal, especially in areas where government licencing is required. Med...

Since its creation in the mid-eighteenth century, the state of Nepal has claimed to be Hindu. This chapter describes how the assertion of Nepal’s Hindu identity became an explicit and politicized state strategy from 1960 to 1990. The definition of the state as Hindu was increasingly challenged after 1990, culminating in the declaration of secularis...

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 maj...

The city of Gorakhpur presents what may be a unique, and is certainly an unusual, configuration of religion and politics. The sitting MP, 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. A...

Book review of Eriksen's Overheating

The Buddha was born in what is now the state of Nepal. Only about 10% of Nepal’s population is Buddhist, but many more feel an affinity for the religion and are outraged when outsiders claim that the Buddha was an Indian. Inside Nepal, however, the question of who has the right to speak for Buddhism is contested. Nepali Buddhists often see themselv...

Book review of Bao's Creating a Buddhist Community

This afterword considers the history of the subfield of the anthropology of Buddhism in light of the essays in this special section of Religion and Society. Anthropologists have sought to combat conventional assumptions about Buddhism and have long made contributions to the study of Buddhism, the state, nationalism, and politics. As part of a matur...

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 wo...

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, a...

Buddhism began a humanistic and individualist set of practices for salvation, a missionary religion which, in the course of its 2500-year history, has encompassed meditation, philosophy, ritual, art, ethnonational identities, and politics. The interaction and changing relationship between Buddhism's monastic leaders (monks, nuns) and the laity, and...

Ethnographische Ansätze, seit den 1990er Jahren fester Bestandteil der deutschsprachigen erziehungswissenschaftlichen Forschung, sind aufgrund ihrer historischen Wurzeln in der Theorie und Forschungspraxis von Ethnologie und Anthropologie in besonderer Weise mit der Erforschung von Differenz in pädagogischen Feldern befasst. Dabei spielt Differenz...

In spite of all the difficulties, the November 2013 elections in Nepal passed off for the most part peacefully and with fewer irregularities than ever before in Nepal. The electoral system was the same as the system used in 2008, with a combination of First Past the Post and Proportional Representation. The results were a defeat for the Maoists, wh...

This article suggests that religion is best understood as comprising at least two features of human life: category and practice. Religious category and religious practice may or may not overlap in a given population's religious identification or ascription, but such a differentiation is highly significant and should be made in the social, political...

This chapter considers some of the ways in which social and cultural anthropology has changed since its heyday in the immediate post-World War Two period.1 In particular, it focuses on the challenges to anthropological fi eldwork methodology, with its stress on long-term stays in specifi c places, arising from the increasing mobility of people, ide...

This book examines in rich detail the lives, struggles, and strategies of South Asian activists seeking to advance various political, social, and environmental causes. Through a series of case studies from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka on activists' efforts, it elucidates how they mediate between different spheres that are often (and some...

According at to an authoritative UNESCO publication, "Cultural rights are now widely recognized as deserving the same protection as human rights" (Perez de Cuellar et al. 1995: 282). But what are cultural rights? Do only individuals have rights or should certain groups defined by a shared culture be granted special rights that other groups don't ha...

In this essay I ask what we can learn by looking at the different ways in which Weber has been used or not used in the study of South Asian religion and in social anthropology more generally. There is an interesting contrast in the reception of [p. 49:] Weber: what he wrote on Hinduism and Indian history has been largely ignored, whereas scholars o...

This volume is the second in the Governance, Conflict, and Civic Action series. To discuss the state of civil society, the 10 articles in Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia present case studies of different kinds of ethnic (‘communal’) activism in South Asia covering countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, and India-with Darjeeling, Rajasthan...

Occasional Papers in Sociology and Anthropology - Volume 10, 2007

Nepal faces the danger of an all-out ethnic war breaking out in the Tarai between madhesis and parbatiyas. But, in most of the country there are so many complex and crosscutting ethnic allegiances which make a Sri Lankan-type polarisation unlikely. In the eastern Tarai, however, with its 30 per cent population of parbatiyas, there is a very real po...

Indian Religions: Renaissance and Renewal, the latest collection of Spalding papers, celebrates the work of Ninian Smart in bringing together papers by some of the most eminent scholars within this field. The papers are concerned with cultural, religious, political or textual exchange and encounter, and therefore in concepts of rupture, revival, re...

2006 saw the final collapse of King Gyanendra's attempt to re-establish monarchical rule. The beneficiaries were the Seven-Party Alliance and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). There followed the re-establishment of Parliament, removal of sovereignty from the king, fluctuating negotiations with the Maoists, a cessation of civil war punctuated b...

'Héritiers de la logique grecque et du monothéisme jug nous appliquons d'instinct aux croyances religieuses le principe de contradiction; dieux et dévots se classent à nos yeux en groupes fermés, exclusifs jusqu'àl'antagonisme. Des statisticiens, sérieux à en mourir de rire, calculent le total des Bouddhistes, des Confucéens, des Shintoistes. Un Hi...

The practice of conversion - changing from one religion to another - is certainly not a modern invention, but it takes on a new and sometimes threatening significance in a modern context characterized by censuses, elections with universal suffrage, and majority rule. In the modern world separate religions have come to be defined, like ethnic groups...

Malgre l'attention accordee par les medias au massacre royal du Nepal en 2001, et malgre la couverture detaillee, a Katmandou du moins, des intrigues de la politique nepalaise, le symbolisme utilise par les deux parties en conflit - le roi et les maoistes - a echappe a l'analyse. L'A. examine particulierement la relation entre le developpement du m...

Most of us work in or for one, but there are surprisingly few sustained analyses of the problems and peculiarities of organizations. Anthropologists are increasingly turning their attention to the study of western organizations, and this timely collection addresses the pleasures and pitfalls of ethnographic research undertaken across a range of org...

Do people everywhere have the same, or even compatible, ideas about multiculturalism, indigenous rights or women's rights? The authors of this book move beyond the traditional terms of the universalism versus cultural relativism debate. Through detailed case-studies from around the world (Hawaii, France, Thailand, Botswana, Greece, Nepal and Canada...

This paper considers the connections between religion, ritual and politics in the works of Clifford Geertz and Maurice Bloch and confronts their approaches with some examples of ritual from Nepal. lt is suggested that both writers have great strengths, often not those conventionally ascribed to them, but both attempts to put forward a theory of rit...

The urban civilization of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley provides a paradigm for the study of caste and Hindu kingship. In this book, six anthropologists, in a genuinely collaborative international endeavour, pool their knowledge of the three ancient Newar cities of Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur, and settlements nearby. The social institut...

The urban civilization of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley provides a paradigm for the study of caste and Hindu kingship. In this book, six anthropologists, in a genuinely collaborative international endeavour, pool their knowledge of the three ancient Newar cities of Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur, and settlements nearby. The social institut...

The urban civilization of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley provides a paradigm for the study of caste and Hindu kingship. In this book, six anthropologists, in a genuinely collaborative international endeavour, pool their knowledge of the three ancient Newar cities of Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur, and settlements nearby. The social institut...

This article examines mediums and spirit possession in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, in the light of I.M. Lewis's writing. It is argued that his approach is most helpful when dealing with the specific question of why some types of people are more likely to be possessed than others. Lewis's theory should not be expected to provide the key to the orig...

The culture of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, is, in metropolitan South Asian terms, archaic. Urban, sophisticated and with a rich ritual and religious life, the Newars preserve old patterns of South Asian culture, including Buddhism. This was what drew Sylvain Levi to Nepal and to write the history of Nepal. "Nepal," he wrote, -- and b...