Sara Shneiderman

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

& South Asian Studies

Ph.D. Cornell University, 2009

sara.shneiderman@yale.edu
10 Sachem Street, Room 126
Tel: (203) 436-4270
Fax: (203) 432-3669

CV

Media Page

Sara Shneiderman is a socio-cultural anthropologist working in the Himalayan regions of Nepal, India and China (especially the Tibetan Autonomous Region). Her research addresses the relationships between political discourse, ritual practice, cultural performance and cross-border migration in producing contemporary ethnic identities. She received her PhD (2009) and MA (2004) from Cornell University, following a BA with Honors from Brown University in both Anthropology and Religious Studies (1997).  Professor Shneiderman is also the faculty coordinator for the Yale Himalaya Initiative.

She is currently preparing two books emerging from her doctoral research with the Thangmi, a Himalayan community of approximately 30,000 resident in Nepal, India and China. Through an ethnography that focuses on the cross-border circulation of Thangmi people and their ideas about ethnic, national, religious and political identity, the first book offers a new explanation for the powerful persistence of ethnicity as a category of identification today despite the increasing realities of mobile, hybrid lives. The second book presents Thangmi ritual texts in Nepali and English translation, and is a collaborative project with an indigenous Thangmi researcher, a Nepali translator, and a linguistic anthropologist. Sara has also published several articles on the themes of Nepal’s Maoist movement and political consciousness; ethnic classification and affirmative action; ritual and religious practice; and gender, agency and identity. Multimedia technologies form a core part of her ethnographic methodology, and she is a founding member of the Digital Himalaya Project.

From 2009-2011 she was a Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, and she remains a Member of the College and a Research Affiliate at the Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge. Since 2009 she has been involved in a British Academy funded UK-South Asia partnership project entitled “Inequality and Affirmative Action in South Asia: Current Experiences and Future Agendas in India and Nepal”, which will hold its final conference in Kathmandu in July 2012. She has also received grants for her research from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.

At Yale she will teach two undergraduate lecture courses, “Contemporary South Asia” (Fall 2011) and “Religion and Ritual in Theory and Practice” (Spring 2012), along with an undergrad/grad seminar, “Affirmative Action in South Asia and the US” (Spring 2012), and a graduate-only seminar, “Ethnicity and Indigeneity in a Mobile World” (Fall 2011).

Shneiderman S. 2010. Producing’ Thangmi Ritual Texts: Practice, Performance and Collaboration” in a special issue of Language Documentation and Description produced by the World Oral Literature Project. Mark Turin and Imogen Gunn, eds. 8: 159-174.

Recent & Featured Publications

Shah A & Shneiderman S (2013) The practices, policies and politics of transforming inequality in South Asia: Ethnographies of affirmative action. Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. 65: 3-12. Introduction to guest edited special issue “Toward an Anthropology of Affirmative Action”. DOI:10.3167/fcl.2013.650101

Shneiderman S (2013) Developing a culture of marginality: Nepal's current classificatory moment. Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. 65: 42-55. In the special issue “Toward an Anthropology of Affirmative Action”, guest edited by Sara Shneiderman and Alpa Shah. DOI:10.3167/fcl.2013.650105

Yale University

10 Sachem Street

New Haven, CT 06511

phone: 203.432.3700

fax: 203.432.3669

email: anthropology@yale.edu