Ethnographic Imagination Basel

This episode’s guest, Vaibhav Saria, is the author of Hijras, Lovers, Brother: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India (published in 2021), an impressively rich and nuanced ethnographic account of the everyday lives of hijras- often translated as one of India’s “trans” populations, how they subvert, play with and preserve and care for normative arrangements. Vaibhav Saria is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Holding a PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, Vaibhav’s research and teaching span a wide array of topics, including global health and medical anthropology; gender, sexuality, and kinship; panics, pandemics, and poverty; questions of ethics, violence, law and nationalism. Host: George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.   Production:   Ethnographic Imagination Basel:   Zainabu Jallo, Ann Karimi Kern (Ethnologisches Seminar Universität Basel)   in collaboration with the New Media Center

In this episode, On Possibility, our guest Anand Pandian joins us virtually from Baltimore. Pandian's book, A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times (published in 2019) explores the possible in relation to knowledge, politics, and experience, but also—specifically—in relation to mundane acts of reading, writing, teaching, and researching. Guest: Anand Pandian is Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to A Possible Anthropology, the book around which our conversation will focus today, he is author of Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (2009); Ayya’s Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India (2014) and Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (2015). Anand is also editor and co-editor of numerous volumes, and his research has spanned across a wide variety of topics from environmental ethics, ecological sensibility, and agrarian cultivation to film, art, and music, to ways of doing anthropology with an “open mind”—with an eye out for possibility. Host: George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Production: Ethnographic Imagination Basel: Zainabu Jallo, Ann Karimi Kern (Ethnologisches Seminar Universität Basel) in collaboration with the New Media Center