Thomas Blom Hansen (Ph.D.) Before joining the Department of Anthropology at Yale in August 2004, I have taught at universities in the UK (University of Edinburgh), Denmark (Roskilde University, Copenhagen University) and South Africa (University of Natal, Durban).

My main interests have for many years been in the intersection between political and legal anthropology and the anthropology of religion. I am interested in questions of violence, identity, the nature of 'the political' - both philosophically and in everyday life, law and everyday forms of legality, the postcolonial state, issues of public religion, secularism, religion and personhood, as well as cultural performances such as film, theatre, music and radio. I have strong theoretical interests in post structuralism, psychoanalysis and political philosophy.

I have worked on South Asia for many years but have extended my interests to South Africa since 1999. I have done fieldwork in Mumbai, Pune and Aurangabad in western India, and since 1999 in formerly Indian townships in Durban and Johannesburg, South Africa.

I am currently working on a book manuscript exploring religious revival, cultural identities, music, and anxious political imaginaries in post-apartheid South Africa seen from the point of view of a formerly Indian township outside Durban. The provisional title is "Melancholia of Freedom: anxiety, race and nostalgia in a South African township." Some of my publications include The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (1999), The BJP and the Compulsions of Politics in India with C. Jaffrelot (ed.)(1998), a book on identity politics in Mumbai entitled, Wages of Violence (2001), and States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State with F. Stepputat (ed).


Mailing address:
Department of Anthropology
Yale University
P. O. Box 208277
New Haven, CT 06520-8277

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