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ISA Conversation with Alpha Shah
5 Plays11 days ago
ALPA SHAH is the award-winning author of ‚Nightmarch‘‚ ‚The Incarcerations‘ and ‚In the Shadows of the State‘. She has presented for BBC Radio 4. She was raised in Nairobi and studied at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics, where she was Professor of Anthropology. She is now Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University, with a fellowship at All Souls College.
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello and welcome to our podcast ESA Conversations with Anthropologists. This is a podcast by the Institute of Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
00:00:17
Speaker
It introduces anthropologists and their work across a broad spectrum of social, cultural, environmental and political research. Next to this current research, we also provided insight into what anthropologists actually do in their day to day.
Introduction to Alpa Shah
00:00:34
Speaker
Today's guest, and we are quite thrilled about this, is Alpa Shah. Thank you for joining us, Alpa. It's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Alpa Shah is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford.
00:00:47
Speaker
She is the award-winning author of several books and a staggering number of edited volumes and articles in the top journals of anthropology as well as other disciplines. Her first book, In the Shadows of the State, is an ethnography of indigenous politics among Adivasi in Charkhand, India.
00:01:06
Speaker
Her second monograph is probably the most well-known also beyond anthropology, It is called Night March among India's revolutionary guerrillas and explores the world of Maoist revolutionaries who are up in arms against the Indian state since 1967. The book has not only been awarded a range of prizes, but has also been translated into several languages, most recently into German as Nachtmarsch, Unterwegs mit Indiens Vergessenen Guerrillas.
00:01:37
Speaker
And then Alper still has another book called The Incarcerations, BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India, which traces the consequences of imprisoning a group of human rights defenders for democracy in India.
00:01:52
Speaker
Now, this is obviously a very, very impressive range of books, Alper. And as we saw by running through the themes, And this will be my first question to you. You usually work on things such as revolutionary insurgency, state and citizenship, or global capitalism and poverty.
00:02:09
Speaker
But actually, you came to our institute in Vienna today to give a lecture on, and I quote, the limits of multi-species thought, which suggests to me that you are opening up a rather new theme.
00:02:21
Speaker
Is this the case or do you consider your new work on multi-species idea as standing in continuity with previous research strands? Perhaps you could tell us a little little bit about the upcoming talk.
00:02:32
Speaker
Oh, sure. Well, I mean, actually, I've worked on these issues for a very long time. and My first book was called In the Shadows of the State, Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Jharkhand is the place where I worked as the land of the forests, land of indigenous people in India, the Adivasis, who you mentioned. And they always struck me as having, you know, very ecologically um ah knowledgeable ways of living and working with the environment. The landscape was always animated with spirits and ghosts and animals.
00:03:11
Speaker
ancestors. And so to me, um this recent trends in anthropology and other disciplines towards multi-species thought, multi-species thinking, ah treating the non-human being on the same terms as human beings, you know, giving agency to objects to spirits to landscapes this was a part of what my work had always already been taking very seriously um and also a long tradition in anthropology it just wasn't called you know multi-species thought or talked about in the way it is now in the current moment suddenly we I think given the ecological crisis that we face the climate crisis suddenly we've seen a great interest ah in anthropology, which has actually been taken up way beyond anthropology in multi-species thinking, in taking the non non-human as seriously as the human.
00:04:13
Speaker
And um while I appreciate the spirit of it, um to me, much of this work... ah has become, that there's been there's a big danger in it, which is that it completely decenters human social responsibility, um decenters the need for us to really um look at human social relations.
Critique of Multi-Species Thinking
00:04:38
Speaker
And so what I'm seeking to do in the lecture today is put my longstanding interests in environmental issues um in conversation with some recent trends in multi-species thinking that are being taken up beyond anthropology as anthropology is offering and remind us um about what are the important issues that are also at stake which are to do with inequality, power relations and that if you know that that my work has taught me so much about, especially you know the writing of my last book, The Incarcerations, which is about um the incarceration of environmental justice activists in India. So I their perspectives and their work to say, okay, hang on, all this multi-species stuff is you know really good at one level, but there's some serious problems with it too. And we really need to um look at things like inequality, power, the rise of capitalism, state violence. the incarceration of all of these activists, not just in India, but in many parts of the world. And those, you know, we can't separate that ontological, cosmopolitical, ah multi-species perspectives from um the real political economic issues um um that are also ah really, we we need to focus on. So it's
00:06:03
Speaker
It's part of my kind of longstanding endeavors to marry culturalist approaches with more political economy approaches and anthropology and beyond. Yeah. Lovely. Thanks for that. That's so interesting. And i can't hear to I can't wait to actually hear the presentation later on.
00:06:18
Speaker
Now with this podcast, we're trying to both get a solid insight into cutting edge cutting edge edge research in anthropology, just as what you've been describing, and we're trying to give listeners a better idea of the day-to-day of anthropologists.
00:06:31
Speaker
So we're interested in what anthropologists actually do and how they came to be fascinated by the topics and regions they work in.
Journey into Anthropology
00:06:40
Speaker
So I wanted to ask you, how did you end up in your field set in East India among Adivasi and in your area of expertise that you've been working on for such a long time now.
00:06:50
Speaker
You know, i mean, most things that happen to us happen because of chance. And my story is very much one of chance, chance encounters. um You'd like to think that it was all orchestrated and you had a beautiful proposal and you ended up, you know, doing exactly what you thought you were going to do. And it's never like that. In fact, the beauty of, I guess, the kind of work we do as anthropologists is that we're driven by um by the quest to find things that we never even thought were fair important, um places and people we'd never even imagined. And um my own adventures into anthropology were a bit like that. I was a geographer and i was realizing the best books I was reading were written by anthropologists and i was like, oh, what are these people?
00:07:40
Speaker
um And so I wanted to become an anthropologist. I did a master's at LSC in anthropology and... Then I realized I had all this theoretical insight into this discipline, but I still wasn't in any way an anthropologist. So I thought I'd like to go and actually gain some field level experience. And I thought at that time, I thought, oh, it's a useless subject. It doesn't have any relevance in the world. I wanted to spend my life doing something that contributed to the world in some way, in some positive ways. So thought I'd go and work in development and I went to India.
00:08:16
Speaker
India is a place where I had distant roots. My grandparents were born there. I wasn't. I was born in Kenya. My parents were born in Kenya. So was this place that kind of fascinated me because of my own roots and because I'd learned so much about India through my teachers at Cambridge.
00:08:32
Speaker
And so I went to India and then I thought, well, I can't go anywhere where I have, where where people can claim me as their own. So um where my family were from, because in India, you know, women are notoriously, I was, you know, in my early 20s and there's a lot of policing around what women can and can't do, patriarchy rules.
00:08:52
Speaker
And so I thought I'll go as far away from anywhere that, you know, I can have any any connection to through my familial roots. And by chance, I landed up in this place, um which was called Jharkhand on the other side of India to to where... where my family came from. um ah ah An old professor at Cambridge, geographer, had a project that he was working on. He said, oh, if you want to gain some experience, you can come and be here with this project team for three months. And so I i went there, um which is looking at a big Department for International Development, UK government, agricultural, rain-fed farming project and how it was implemented in these Adivasi areas.
00:09:34
Speaker
And so I went around and I was like going around in these Land Rovers with these development people and then it was very dissatisfactory, you know unsatisfactory for for three months thinking, but I actually, ah we're we're we're gaining all this knowledge through questionnaires and some kind of interviews, but actually...
00:09:53
Speaker
It seems very superficial. And then that's when I knew I really had to be an anthropologist and go and live amongst the people that we were working on. And so that's when I applied for a PhD in anthropology. And I returned to the same areas, having tried to learn Hindi at SOAS and then actually realizing that that is not a language that was spoken even in those villages. And then, yeah, starting to do what anthropologists do, which is...
00:10:22
Speaker
stay for a very, very long period of time amongst the people whose lives you're researching and following them in all kinds of directions. um Yeah, sorry, the long answer to your question. Thank you so much for taking the time to just see this meandering way and that it brought you where you now have been working for such a long period of time.
00:10:44
Speaker
um I think we'll now dig into the questions of the day-to-day little more. um I'm curious, like this might sound unrelated to what you just said, but is there something you recently read, a text, anthropological text or anything else really, that we kind of thought, wow, this is this is fascinating, like this kind of sticks, this let me understand something, I guess this might have to do with multispecies theme you're now working on, or perhaps over the longer run with your research in in India?
Influences on Alpa's Perspectives
00:11:14
Speaker
Yeah, well, i I read a lot. um ah So the most recent thing I've read Judith Bovinsipian's book, um which is forthcoming. So it's a draft of the book. And that's been a fantastic journey into Timor-Leste. and looking at oil extraction, and um which becomes a kind of national project as Timor-Leste gains independence. And it does very much relate to the multispecies work, because what she ends up arguing is that the...
00:11:49
Speaker
um the the fight for and against oil, i mean, the the extraction of oil is conducted around a kind of idea of culture that's created by people in Timor-Leste, which show people to be animists. And actually, the this is actually a recent, what she's showing is this is actually a recent invention, the kind of formalization of animism, amongst people in Timor-Leste is a kind of creation of oil extraction. So it's it's quite interesting because often indigenous politics works around um indigenous people.
00:12:32
Speaker
ah People say that that that they are arguing to be animists um in relay against these development projects. But here what you see is it's that encounter, that developmental encounter, that extractivistic encounter, which has created animus animism as a way of um of of arguing ah for different sides of this this um this equation. So yeah, this there's been it's been a great it's been great to journey into into into this um into into a very different part of the world. The other thing I've read recently is um
00:13:08
Speaker
Maria Alonkina's book called The Political Girl, which is about to be published by Penguin. um And she was one of the Pussy Riot girls. And she talks about, um she's you know she'd be she was incarcerated by um by putin's russia and detained and threatened you know re kind of lots of incarcerations that the Pussy Riot Girls went through and detentions. And then eventually she leaves Russia and she writes this book.
00:13:41
Speaker
And it's just this very visceral, visceral account of what it feels like to live under an authoritarian regime. Yeah. And it's just like really short chapters and extremely powerful writing. And I'm i very interested in writing as well as ah as a kind of genre, different genres of writing and how we, you we have a lot in common as anthropologists with investigative journalists, people who are doing, you know, more biographical um writing. And you know I'm interested in how we can kind of push the discipline and think about reaching wider publics, as with my book Night March or The Incarcerations. And so i was asked so i was asked to endorse um the Pussy Riot Maria's book. So that's that's how I ended up reading it. And I just thought, well, actually, we have so much to learn you know as anthropologists from this these forms of writing. So yeah I really really recommend that when it comes out. Yeah.
00:14:42
Speaker
That's fascinating. yeah I can't wait for it to actually come out. I wanted to go back to something you said before that you actually can read a lot or do read a lot. And my sense talking to professors was often that they lament a lot that they don't have the time to read enough.
00:14:57
Speaker
So I was wondering, like, how does your usual day as an anthropologist look like during a teaching
Balancing Academic and Personal Life
00:15:03
Speaker
term? Like, how do you fit all that writing all that reading into your days?
00:15:07
Speaker
ah I think both of those things are true, right? Like you you can never read as much as you want to. But yeah, I mean, my my days as an anthropologist have changed a lot over the last few years. And um those changes are to do with having a child. Yeah.
00:15:28
Speaker
And, you know, I used to be one of these people who had to have, you know, the desk perfectly clear and then, you know, i need to go for my morning swim and then i can get down to my desk to write. And, you know, had to be everything had to be like, you I had these patterns of writing and write four hours in the morning and then, you know, go away and do something else and then come back and read what you wrote and, you know, do a bit of reading in the afternoon. And all of that has got blown completely out of the picture, you know. So when you have a little child that you're caring for and main care for, you just basically grab whatever time you can to do whatever is possible. So I have no pattern, no rhythm, no rhyme to my writing.
00:16:14
Speaker
All my reading, all my work. um But it is, there is a kind of cyclical nature to the academic year, because obviously you have at Oxford, where where I'm teaching now, we have these three um very intensive eight-week terms. And they're really amazing, really rewarding, intellectually brilliant terms.
00:16:33
Speaker
um But they're so intense, there's very little time to actually read and write and um um lots of time for intellectual conversation. but And then you have these periods when you know you're in in in the holidays and that's when you try to you know do do more more writing. At least I now try to do more writing in those periods. But then again, again. Children, sure yeah, they you know they need to be taken they here, or there and everywhere. ah So, yeah, I think, you know, i mean, deadlines, deadlines are great. You know, deadlines, you just, I end up i end up reading a lot because I've committed to things like discussing Judith's book with her or like giving an endorsement for Maria's book. you know, maria's ah Maria's book coming out or, you know, I'm reviewing a book for the LRB soon. And so it's you that's how you end up reading. and
00:17:28
Speaker
But yeah, it's it's important. And then you read about around subjects that you're writing around and you have intense kind of sessions around them. So I must have read lots of multi-species stuff in the last in the last year writing writing writing this paper. But yeah.
00:17:43
Speaker
Fascinating. Thanks for these insights. I think we're already coming to the final question. um We here at the Institute for Social Anthropology in Vienna have certain themes for the coming year, which we picked together and which we will do research on from across different regional and topical expertise.
Theme of Destruction and Reconstruction
00:18:03
Speaker
Now, the one for 2026 is destruction, and we consciously try to keep it as open as somehow possible to include a lot of perspectives.
00:18:12
Speaker
and So this includes ideologies of why destruction might be necessary and even desirable in some situations. And of course, it also includes questions of blame and justice following catastrophes or other very, very bad things. Now, I was wondering what forms of destruction appear actually in your work, and I imagine it's quite a few.
00:18:36
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's intense. It's immense. You know, i'm all kinds of destruction. There's environmental destruction. There's the killing of millions of people. well millions, ah hundreds of thousands of people. The the incarceration of thousands of people, um the you know just this kind of level of violence, destruction of communities, um intergenerational destruction, family destruction. um It's everywhere, right? um i think I'm kind of both driven by how we analyze destruction, but also how we think about reconstruction and solidarity and how we bring things together and um create create better worlds. So it's such a vast topic, isn't it? And and we're we're surrounded by it in every way possible.
00:19:30
Speaker
um The challenge is actually how we move beyond it and how we work together to move beyond it. So actually, um probably what animates me the most and what I spend a lot of time thinking about, whether it is in my writing or whether it is... in my day-to-day life, in how I construct conduct and think of myself as ah as a scholar, as creating space for other people. It's really about building things and building things together, um which are maybe destroying earlier hierarchies and earlier inequalities, but how we can move forward in in new ways together. Wow, that's a really optimistic note to end on, actually. Thanks so much for your time, Alper. We really appreciated having you here. This has been an incredibly insightful discussion. Thanks for joining us.
00:20:16
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you