Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include urban reconfiguration, the politics of public space, transnational processes, the state and popular culture in India. He received his BA from Harvard University in 2001 and received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2008.
His doctoral research was based on field research with street vendors in Mumbai. He focused on the ways in which vendors inhabited the city’s streets and public space as well as how, despite their illegal status, they negotiated with the state to gain rights to work on the street. He also researched middle-class voluntary organizations whose activism is directed at eradicating street vendors. In particular, he explored the way these local campaigns to reconfigure the appearance and function of the city’s streets were related to desires to alter the way citizenship is practiced in the city.
His current work is on the politics of middle-class vegetarianism in
Mumbai, which is closely linked with religious and ethnic chauvinism. This project will focus on the proliferation of vegetarian-only
neighborhoods and housing societies, and how this relates to larger
reconfigurations of citizenship and space in the city.
He is also interested in developing a theory of South Asian urban anthropology in a transnational, comparative, perspective. As part of this project, he is co-editing a volume on comparative studies of urban reconfiguration in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
He is also working on a co-authored project with a literary scholar, which is a literary and geographical mapping of twentieth and early twenty-first century Mumbai. This project will trace shifts in the politics of urban space, work and housing through the literature and poetry of the city.
His recent publications include:
“Street Hawkers and Public Space in Mumbai.” In Economic and Political Weekly. 2006. 41(21): 2140 2146.
“The Mall and the Street: Practices of public consumption in Mumbai.” In The Lived Experiences of Public Consumption: Encounters with Value in Marketplaces on Five Continents. Ed. Daniel Cook. 2008. 203-220,
“On Street Life and Urban Disasters: Lessons from the ‘Third World’”. In What is a City?: Rethinking the urban after Hurricane Katrina. Eds. Phil Steinberg and Rob Shields. University of Georgia Press. [forthcoming 2008]
Forthcoming “Text, Genre, Society: Hindi popular film and postcolonial desire.” Co-authored with Ulka Anjaria. In Journal of South Asian Popular Culture [forthcoming, expected October 2008]
Dosa maker under "no-hawking zone' sign |
Vegetable vendors in Mumbai
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Sign on newly constructed seaside walk in Bandra, Mumbai |
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