Professor Alpa Shah

Professor of Social Anthropology
Fellow of All Souls College
Bio
Alpa Shah is Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford, with a Fellowship at All Souls College. Her research and writings span many themes including revolutionary insurgency, state and citizenship; terrorism, democracy and human rights; global capitalism, inequality and poverty; agrarian change, precarious labour migration and informal economies of care; indigenous politics, conservation and environmental justice; race, caste, class and gender relations. Much of Alpa’s writings are based on the experience of deep immersive field research among the forest dwelling indigenous people of eastern India – Adivasis. She has also conducted research in Nepal and among Dalits, stigmatised as Untouchable people.
Alpa’s latest book, The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India is a finalist for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, on the 2024 longlist for the Moore Human Rights Prize, and on the Financial Times ‘What to Read in 2024’ list. It has garnered widespread acclaim in The Times, Guardian, The Financial Times, New Statesman, Telegraph and Nature, amongst others.
Her last book, Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas, won many accolades including being a finalist for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the New India Foundation Book Prize, longlisted for the 2019 Tata Live Literary Non-fiction Award, selected as a 2018 Book of the Year for the New Statesman, History Workshop, Scroll India, a Hindu Year in Review Book, and a Hong Kong Free Press Best Human Rights Book. In 2020, Nightmarch won the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize in Critical Anthropology.
Alpa has also co-authored Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India, a 2018 Book of the Year for the Hindu, which draws on a major research programme she led on inequality and poverty that explodes the myth of trickle-down economics. It shows how and why tribal and untouchable communities – Adivasis and Dalits – who make up one in twenty-five people in the world, remain at the bottom of social and economic hierarchies despite the country’s economic growth. Behind the Indian Boom is a visual exhibition based on this research.
Alpa’s first book In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India was based on two and a half years of living with indigenous people in the undulating forests of the state of Jharkhand, India.
Alpa has edited seven volumes on issues ranging from affirmative action, agrarian change, revolution in India and Nepal, emancipatory politics, economic growth in India, and Adivasi and Dalit political pathways. As a scholar, Alpa has published widely not only in the top journals of anthropology but also in those of geography, sociology and development studies. See publications for a full list. Over the years, Alpa’s theoretical contributions to anthropology have sought to marry culturalist approaches with a wider political economy lens, shedding light on the processes of social transformation that both unite and differentiate communities.
Alpa’s research has been generously funded by major research grants from the EU European Research Council, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. She serves on, or served on, the editorial boards of several prominent journals in Anthropology including American Ethnologist, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, Focaal and Dialectical Anthropology, and on journals in South Asia Studies and Development Studies. At LSE, Alpa has a long-term involvement in the establishment of the International Inequalities Institute, whose management committee she served on till 2023, and where she convened a research theme on Global Economies of Care. She was also on the advisory board of the LSE Gender Department. Alpa has served on the juries of several prizes including the BBC Ethnography Prize.
Alpa has been invited to speak all over the world about her research, from Dunedin to Princeton, and has delivered numerous distinguished lectures including the Malinowski Lecture, the Strathern Lecture and the Firth Lecture. Alpa is committed to public engagement and has reported and presented on the underbelly of India for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, including making a thirty-minute documentary on ‘India’s Red Belt’. She has also written for newspapers and magazines such as the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, the Times of India and Hindustan Times. In 2022, Alpa was winner of the 2022 ERC Public Engagement Prize.
Alpa was raised in Nairobi, read Geography at Cambridge and completed her PhD in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She taught anthropology for a decade at LSE, and for eight years at Goldsmiths, University of London. Oxford University appointed Alpa as Professor of Social Anthropology with a Fellowship at All Souls College in 2024 and she became the eighth person to hold the post, the first woman and the first person of the global majority.
Contact
Email: alpa.shah@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Much of Alpa’s writing, inspiration and engagement emerges from years of living as an anthropologist, a participant observer, among India’s indigenous people in the forests in the heart of the country. Below are a list of her academic writings, some of which can also be accessed on academia.edu and ResearchGate.
BOOKS
2024 The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India. HarperCollins: London and Delhi
2018 Nightmarch: Among India's Revolutionary Guerrillas. London: Hurst; Chicago: University of Chicago Press; New Delhi: HarperCollins.
2017 Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India. London: Pluto Press (co-authored with Jens Lerche, Richard Axelby, Dalel Benbabaali, Brendan Donegan, Jayaseelan Raj and Vikramditya Thakur).
2017 Behind the Indian Boom: Inequality and Resistance at the heart of the economic growth. Kolkatta: Adivaani.
2010 In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Durham (N.C.) and London: Duke University Press. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
EDITED WORKS
2021 In Honour of David Graeber. Focaal blog on Lost People, Value, Debt, Myth, Bureaucracy and Bullshit Jobs (Ed with Becky Bowers, Megan Laws and Giulio Ongaro). Based on a term of weekly LSE Research Seminars on Anthropological Theory that I convened in honour of our late colleague.
2016 'Beyond citizenship: Adivasi and Dalit Political Pathways in India' (edited with Nicholas Jaoul). Special issue of Focaal Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 76: 3-14.
2015 'Emancipatory Politics: A Critique' (Edited with Stephan Feuchtwang). Open Anthropology Cooperative Press.
2014 ‘Savage Attack: Adivasi Insurgency in India' (Edited with Crispin Bates). New Delhi: Social Science Press.
2013 ‘The Underbelly of the Indian Boom' (Edited with Stuart Corbridge). Special issue of Economy and Society 42: (3).
2013 ‘Agrarian Questions and Left Politics in India' (Edited with Jens Lerche and Barbara Harriss-White). Special issue of Journal of Agrarian Change 13: (3).
2013 ‘Towards an Anthropology of Affirmative Action: the Practices, Policies and Politics of Transforming Inequality in South Asia' (Edited with Sara Shneiderman). Special issue of Focaal, Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 65.
2012 ‘Windows Into a Revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal’ (Edited with Judith Pettigrew). New Delhi: Social Science Press. An earlier version of this edited collection was published as a special double issue of Dialectical Anthropology 33 (3/4), 2009.
2006 ‘A Double-edged Sword: Protection and State Violence’ (Edited with Toby Kelly). Special issue of Critique of Anthropology 26 (3).
ARTICLES
2024 When Decolonisation is Hijacked. American Anthropologist.
2022 ‘Why I Write: In a climate against intellectual dissidence.’ Current Anthropology. 63 (5): 570-598 (Includes Comments and Shah’s response titled ‘Why Write’)
2022 Understanding patterns of structural discrimination against migrant and other workers in some countries of South and West Asia. International Labour Organisation (with Igor Bosc, Jens Lerche, Miranda Fajerman and Neha Wadhawan).
2021 ‘What if We Selected our Leaders by Lottery? Democracy by Sortition, Liberal Elections and Communist Revolutionaries.’ Development and Change (The 2020 inaugural David Graeber Memorial Lecture and the 2019 Key Note Lecture for the Development Studies Association annual conference).
2021 ‘For an Anthropological Theory of Praxis: Dystopic Utopia in Indian Maoism and the rise of the Hindu Right.’ Social Anthropology. 29 (1): 68-86.
2021 ‘Black Lives Matter, Capital, and Ideology: Spiralling out from India’ (with Jens Lerche). British Journal of Sociology 72: 93-105.
2021 ‘Conjugated Oppression: Race, Caste, Tribe, Gender and Class’ (with Jens Lerche). Avneshi. Broadsheet on Contemporary Politics. 15. (Also translated into Tamil).
2020 ‘Migration and the Invisible Economies of Care: Production, social reproduction and seasonal migrant labour in India.’ (with Jens Lerche) Royal Geographical Society Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers. 45: 719-734.
2018 'Conjugated oppression under contemporary capitalism: class relations, social oppression and agrarian change in India' (with Jens Lerche). Journal of Peasant Studies 45 (5): 927-949
2017 'Naxalbari at its Golden Jubilee: Fifty Recent Books on the Maoist Movement in India'. Modern Asian Studies: 1-55.
2017 'Ethnography? Participant observation, a potentially revolutionary praxis'. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 45-59. (Translated into Portugese and made into a comic adaptation).
2017 'Humaneness and Contradictions: India's maoist-inspired Naxalites'. Economic and Political Weekly 52 (21): 52-56.
2015 'Class Struggle, the Maoists and the Indigenous Question in Nepal and India' (with Feyzi Ismail). Economic and Political Weekly L (35): 112-123.
2015 'Maoist Movement (Naxalites)' in Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies, Gita Dharampal-Frick et al (eds). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
2014 'The Muck of the Past: Revolution and Social Transformation in Maoist India'. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 20: 337-356 (the Malinowski Memorial Lecture, 2012).
2014 'Religion and the Secular Left: Subaltern Studies, Birsa Munda and Maoists'. Anthropology of this century 9.
2014 'La Lutte Révolutionnaire des Maoïstes Continue en Inde' (article adapted by Jean-Paul Gaudillère and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal). Mouvements 77 (1): 55-75.
2013 'Response to Nandini Sundar's Response to 'The Tensions Over Citizenship in a Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Situation: The Maoists in India'. Critique of Anthropology 33: 476.
2013 ‘The Intimacy of Insurgency: Beyond Coercion, Greed, or Grievance in Maoist India'. Economy and Society 42 (3): 480-506.
2013 ‘Introduction: The Underbelly of the Indian Boom’ (with Stuart Corbridge). Economy and Society 42 (3): 335-347.
2013 ‘The Agrarian Question in a Maoist Guerrilla Zone: Land, Labour and Capital in the Forests and Hills of Jharkhand, India'. Journal of Agrarian Change 13 (3): 424-450.
2013 ‘Introduction: Agrarian Questions and Left Politics in India’ (with Jens Lerche and Barbara Harriss-White). Journal of Agrarian Change 13 (3): 337-350.
2013 ‘The Tensions Over Liberal Citizenship in a Marxist Revolutionary Situation: The Maoists in India'. Critique of Anthropology 33 (1): 91-109.
2013 ‘Preface’ (with Bernard D’Mello). An Anthology of José Carlos Mariátegui. Translated by Mark Becker and Harry E. Vanden. New Delhi: Cornerstone Publications.
2013 ‘Conservative Force or Contradictory Resource? Education and Affirmative Action in Jharkhand, India’ (with Rob Higham). COMPARE: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 43 (6): 718-739.
2013 ‘Affirmative Action and Political Economic Transformations: Secondary Education, Indigenous People and the State in Jharkhand, India' (with Rob Higham). Focaal, Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (65): 80-93.
2012 ‘In Search of Certainty in Revolutionary India', in Windows into a Revolution, Alpa Shah and Judith Pettigrew (eds). New Delhi: Social Science Press. An earlier version of this edited collection was published as a special double issue of Dialectical Anthropology 33 (3/4), 2009.
2012 'Éliminer la Classe, la Caste et l'Indigénéité dans l’Inde Maoïste’. Terrain: Revue d’Ethnologie de l’Europe 58: 64-81.
2011 ‘Resurrecting Scholarship on Agrarian Studies in India' (with Barbara Harriss-White). Economic and Political Weekly XLVI (39): 13-18.
2011 ‘India Burning: the Maoist Movement’ in A Companion to the Anthropology of India, Isabelle Clark-Decès (ed). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
2010 ‘Alcoholics Anonymous: the Maoist Movement in Jharkhand, India'. Modern Asian Studies 45 (5): 1095-1117.
2009 ‘Morality, Corruption and the State: Insights from Jharkhand, Eastern India'. Journal of Development Studies 45 (3): 295-313.
2007 ‘Keeping the State Away: Democracy, Politics and Imaginations of the State in India’s Jharkhand'. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (1): 129-145.
2006 ‘The Labour of Love: Seasonal Migration from Jharkhand to the Brick Kilns of Other States in India'. Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s) 40 (1): 91-119.
2006 ‘Markets of Protection: The Maoist Communist Centre and the State in Jharkhand, India’. Critique of Anthropology 26 (3): 297-314.