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2004-2005 Fellows

2004-2005 Fellow Gupta

Akhil Gupta

Stanford University
Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology

Akhil Gupta is Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. His current work focuses on the implications of reincarnation for social theory. Another book project looks at the role of representation and everyday practices in the constitution of states, based on ethnographic research on developmental bureaucracies in north India. He is also working on an edited reader on the anthropology of the state. Gupta's entire post-secondary education was in various departments of engineering, first in mechanical engineering and then culminating in a Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford. His first teaching position was at the University of Washington in Seattle in the School of International Studies.

Project Summary

In his project, Gupta takes the fact that beliefs in reincarnation are widely accepted in all parts of South Asia to conduct a thought experiment: Would a serious engagement with reincarnation cause a fundamental rethinking of that which is taken-for-granted in cultural, social, and political theory? The planned volume employs reincarnation to rethink and fundamentally question a particular subject area. His year at SHC would be used to write the remaining two chapters and the introduction, and to revise the book so that it achieves a coherence and unity.

In the process of doing fieldwork in the Gangetic plains of India, Gupta observed just how ubiquitous were narratives of rebirth. Reincarnation was so much a part of the "common-sense" of the populace that it rarely invited surprise or astonishment. Although his interests in this project are primarily theoretical, he will draw upon some of the reincarnation narratives that he collected during fieldwork, as well as an extensive literature on reincarnation narratives published in magazines and books. In emphasizing reincarnation as a "social fact," Gupta is concerned not with whether reincarnation stories are "really" true or not, but on the fact that people act as if they were true, that is, that they are socially consequential. Gupta's project investigates the implications of a comparative ontology for (western) social and cultural theory. He wishes to use reincarnation to open up a fresh set of questions for existing theoretical positions.