Research Affiliate
Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Development, King's College London
I am a social anthropologist who has been working on issues around the Maoist civil war, migration, and social change in Nepal. Over the past decade, I have been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the mid-Western hills of the Nepali Himalayas: the heartland of the Maoist insurgency during the civil war of 1996-2006, home to a vibrant but rapidly changing shamanic tradition, and, more recently, a hotbed of (ir)regular international migration to the USA and beyond.
My main research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of violence and social suffering, economic anthropology, and the anthropology of migration, with a focus on transnational family networks, various forms of exchange underpinning migration, including debt and remittances, and economies of waiting and hope under late capitalism. I have started developing an interest in the anthropology of religion and the invisible world through my work on 'reluctant shamans' and spirit possession among one of the indigenous groups in Nepal.
Before joining King's College London, I was a Departmental Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography.
Key Publications:
Monograph
2019 Maoist People’s War and the Revolution of Everyday Life in Nepal. Cambridge University Press.
Articles, Book Chapters, and a Blog
2024 ‘Reluctant Shamans: on the Limits of Human Agency and the Power of the Partible Souls among the Kham Magars of Nepal’. In ed.by A. de Sales and M. Lecomte-Tilouine Encounters with the Invisible: Revisiting Spirit Possession in the Himalayas, pp. 58-76. Routledge.
2022 ‘From Fraternal Nations to Fratricidal War?’ Making Sense of the War in Ukraine, COMPAS Blog Series.
2021 ‘We are in the Process’: the Exploitation of Hope and the Political Economy of Waiting among the Aspiring Irregular Migrants in Nepal’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (as part of the edited issue ‘The Labour of Hope: Affect, Oscillation, Power’) 39 (5): 827-843.
2019 ’Money and Blood: Remittances as a Substance of Relatedness in Transnational Families in Nepal’, American Anthropologist 121 (4): 884-896.
2019 ‘‘Bringing the Light’: Youth, Development, and Everyday Politics in post-conflict Nepal’, European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 53: 70-108.
2019 ‘Gender, Marriage, and the Dynamic of (Im)mobility in Transnational Families in Mid-Western Nepal’, Mobilities 14 (5): 681-695.
2018 (with Jo Boyden) ‘The Impact of Development on Children’, in the International Encyclopaedia of Anthropology (ed. by Paul Sillitoe).
2017 ‘Rules that Apply in Times of Crisis’: Time, Agency and Norm-Remaking during the People’s War in Nepal’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 (4): 783-800.
2017 (with Virginia Morrow, Nardos Chuta and Yisak Tafere) ‘I started working because I was hungry’: the Consequences of Food Insecurity on Children’s Well-being in rural Ethiopia, Social Science and Medicine 182: 1-9.
2016 ‘When Gods Return to their Homeland in the Himalayas’: Maoism, Religion and Change in the Model Village of Thabang, mid-Western Nepal’, in D. Gellner, S. Hauser and C. Letizia (eds) Religion, Secularism and Ethnicity in Contemporary Nepal, pp. 77-114. Delhi: Oxford University Press India.
2015 ‘De-mythologizing the ‘’Village of Resistance’: How Rebellious were the Peasants in the Maoist base area of Nepal?’, Dialectical Anthropology, 39 (4): 353-379.
2013 ‘Learning in a Guerrilla Community of Practice: Situated Learning, Literacy Practices and Youth in Nepal’s Maoist Movement ’, European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 42 (Spring-Summer Issue): 104-134.
2009 ‘A New Way of being Young in Nepal: the Idea of Maoist Youth and Dreams of a New Man’, Studies in Nepali History and Society, 14 (1): 67-107.
