Stanford Humanities Center
Mudit Trivedi is an archaeologist with interests in religious subjectivity, materiality, craft and historical anthropology.
His first book project, An Archaeology of Virtue, considers the archaeology of conversion to Islam through the results of an ongoing long-term archaeological project he has co-directed at the site of Indor in Rajasthan, North India. This research bridges archaeological and anthropological conceptualizations of tradition. It considers the thematizations of ethical relations, hierarchies and gendered pious praxis in material media. It brings together analyses of architectural, spatial and artifactual datasets combined with compositional elemental analyses. The project’s wider goals are to rethink the secular modern commitments of archaeology and the nature of the archaeological trace.
Trivedi is also interested in developing critiques of archaeology’s disciplinary commitments to liberal values and legal infrastructures. A first paper from this project critically re-situates colonial Treasure Trove laws that framed the archaeological common good around the taking of finds from others. This second project reconsiders archaeological praxis and the discipline’s recourse to property law in a series of South Asian contexts ranging from accidental finds to disputes centred on waqfs.
His forthcoming publications relate to these combined interests. They cover archaeometric insights into social contexts of glass artifact production and use in South Asian and other contexts; the long-term settlement history of the region of Mewat in North India, and theoretical problems in the historical and archaeological study of religion and conversion. He has co-edited a special issue of the Medieval History Journal on "Archaeologies of the Medieval in South Asia."
SHC Project
Discipline and Pleasure: Archaeologies of Virtue, Faith and Envy
My project rethinks what we commonly call "conversion" as instead the affective, embodied, and ensouled embrace of a new tradition. I attend to the difficulty the newly faithful face as they set down the ethics and practices of the form-of-life they were raised in, to learn new forms of inhabiting the good. I bring together archival and ethnographic research with extensive archaeological survey and excavation I conducted at Indor, a city raised by a generation of converts in North India in the 14th century AD. Through these assemblages, I provide an account of convert’s practices and the arguments they made in joining the debates which sustain the discursive traditions of Islam. This year, I will complete my book manuscript, which focuses on how ordinary, oft-overlooked ornaments, glass bangles, served as crucial material means for the newly faithful, linking discipline with pleasure, joining virtue with desire, and gender with craft.
