Anthropology Archives

Ruokuonuo Rose Yhome

Dr. Ruokuonuo Rose Yhome obtained her B.A. degree from St. Joseph’s College, University of Nagaland in 2012, and her master’s degree from the Department of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology, Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute, Pune in 2014. She then received her Ph.D. in 2021 under the supervision of Dr. Veena Mushrif Tripathy at Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute, Pune. Her doctoral research focused on microwear analysis of human dentition recovered from the Jotsoma, Leshemi, Ranyak Khen, and Rikhelüwong sites in Nagaland.

At Highland Institute, an independent research center located in Nagaland, Dr. Yhome worked as Programme Manager and supervised field teams. During such efforts, she collaborated with international research teams from the U.K., including the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development and the University of Leeds, as well as with national teams from India, including Oxford Policy Management and the World Bank.

Although diet is broadly accepted as a critical parameter for understanding human behavior and ecological adaptation, and dental microwear analysis (DMA) is emerging as a preferred method by which bioarcheologists and paleontologists can reconstruct the diets of past peoples, the latter remains largely unused at India’s most important archaeological sites. During her Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Yhome aims to address this significant lacuna by exploring the dietary behaviors of Chalcolithic, including Harappan and Iron Age populations, through an analysis of dental remains recovered from Harrapan, Chalcolithic, and Megalithic sites in India.

Meghna Rohit Amin

Ms. Meghna Rohit Amin is a doctoral candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. Her doctoral research examines the intergenerational occupational shift among the head-loading Mogaveera women who constitute the matrilineal fishing community of coastal Karnataka in India. Primarily based on fieldwork and ethnographic narratives, the study locates the constant deliberation of the Mogaveera women with fishing which is their caste occupation.

Ms. Amin’s dissertation for her master’s degree in Sociology from the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities was also on the Mogaveera women. The research study is titled “Putting Food on the Table: A Period Study on the Head Loading Mogaveera Women.” After her graduation, she joined an advocacy group where she worked as a digital campaigner and ran campaigns for the rights of marginalized communities, combating air pollution, and raising awareness about climate change. She also taught English to high school children in Udaipur, managed a restaurant in Manipal, and served as a barista at a cafe in Bengaluru.

She has been selected for the award of ICSSR full-term centrally administered Doctoral Fellowship for 2021-22. As a Fulbright-Nehru recipient, Ms. Amin is keen to collaboratively interpret ethnographic narratives and accounts at the intersectionality of caste, class, and gender in relation to occupational mobility within the discipline of native anthropology.

Kadiguang Panmei

Mr. Kadiguang Panmei is a doctoral fellow at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and his research is focussed on the documentation and preservation of Zeliangruang (Zeliangrong) Naga folk music. He holds a master’s degree in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi university, an MPhil in Social Sciences from TISS Mumbai and is also a certified audio engineer and music producer from ILM academy.

As a member of the tribal community of the Ruangmei (Rongmei) Nagas from Manipur in northeast India, his interests in research include the study of tribal culture from its myriad perspectives on food, the arts, geopolitics and more. He is a recipient of the UGC JRF (2016) for conducting his MPhil-Ph.D. research and was awarded the emerging scholar award at the international food studies conference (2019) held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan for the presentation of his MPhil paper. He was also awarded the Sahapedia–UNESCO Fellowship in 2019 to conduct research on the aural history of the Ruangmei Nagas of Manipur.

He believes that research on music should include a union of both the sonorities of music and the lexical narratives behind its histories and philosophies. His Ph.D. research on Zeliangruang Naga folk music therefore considers not only the important need of the written word but also, the preservation of folk songs and music through recordings and audio archiving.

The Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship for him is a crucial step towards not only completing his Ph.D. research but his vision to document and preserve folk music and to facilitate the recovery of dying oral traditions from the northeast region of India. Through his work, he hopes to add more to the growing stock of research on the people of north east India, uncovering the plethora of ethno-cultural knowledge that this remote region of India has to offer. When he is not reading or writing for his research, he likes to cook, produce music and play the guitar.

Utkarsh Kumar

Prof. Utkarsh Kumar has taught as a guest Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, New Delhi. Prof. Kumar received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Delhi in 2019. He was the recipient of the ICSSR Doctoral Fellowship. Dr. Kumar obtained his Masters in Social Work from the prestigious Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra. Previously, during his professional stint in the development sector with PRADAN, Prof. Kumar designed and implemented various livelihood prototypes at the grassroots. His research interests span Anthropology of Care and Caring profession, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and the political economy of mineral resource extraction. Prof. Kumar has several research articles to his credit. I n 2020, Prof. Kumar authored commissioned research documents on the ongoing conflict and negotiations around mega power projects in Jharkhand. He has also offered consultancy for the ‘just transition’ in the e nergy sector to s outh Asia- based advocacy groups, viz. The Research Collective and Public Finance and Public Accountability Collective.

The Heavy Mining Equipment (HME) technology has arguably become a crucial global mediator in resource extractive industrial operations. A multi-site ethnographic field stint expedited by the Fulbright-Nehru P ostdoctoral Research grant is an attempt to understand the designing imperatives of the HME machinery produced in the global North, and to trace social relations fostered and shaped around deployment practices of these machines in the global South. The aim is to capture socio-cultural imaginations and aspirations of social actors and institutions associated with the designing, circulation, and deployment practices of HME technology.

Sadhana Naithani

Dr. Sadhana Naithani is a Professor at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She is the Coordinator of the Folklore Unit at JNU, an Honorary Fellow of the American Folklore Society, and the current President of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.

She did her Ph.D. in the field of German Folkloristics. She has been interested in the transformation of the concept of folklore in different historical contexts-under British colonialism, in Germany after World War II, and in the Baltic countries under Soviet occupation. She is the author of In Quest of Indian Folktales (Indiana University Press, 2006), The Story Time of the British Empire (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), Folklore Theory in Post-war Germany (University Press of Mississippi, 2014) and Folklore in Baltic History, Resistance and Resurgence (University Press of Mississippi, 2019). Her novella: Elephantine (Red Squirrel Press, 2016) is based on her research in colonial forestry led by German scientists in British India. She is on the editorial boards of journals Marvels and Tales, Cultural Analysis, and Journal of the School of Languages.

Dr. Naithani is deeply interested in the relationship of human and non-human beings experienced in cultural-political contexts and expressed in narratives. As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar at University of California, Berkeley, she will explore the narratives of British colonizers about the wild non-human animals of the colonies. She will teach a graduate course in the Fall Semester and an undergraduate course in the Spring Semester around her research theme.

Ahana Ghosh

Ms. Ahana Ghosh is a doctoral scholar and Teaching Assistant at the Archaeological Sciences Centre, Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat. She is also a student ambassador from South Asia for the Society for Archaeological Sciences. She completed her master’s and M.Phil. in archaeology from the University of Kolkata, Kolkata, and Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, Pune, Maharashtra respectively. Her research interest is grounded in the food archaeology of South Asia. Her work also elucidates the concept of “culinary landscape” and different aspects of “realities” and “representations” of food.

In the past, Ms. Ghosh held an Early Career Researcher position at the Rewriting World Archaeology program, Durham University, UK, and was Visiting Researcher at Stockholm University, Sweden as well as at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, US. She has published and co-authored papers and book chapters in many reputed international peer-reviewed journals like Holocene, Radio-Carbon, and Zenedo, and also presented her work at many international conferences. Moreover, she received “Student Research Support” from the Society for Archaeological Sciences for her doctoral project, and has shot a documentary film on the culinary journey of the communities living in the Dholavira village, Rann of Kutch, Gujarat.

Ms. Ghosh’s doctoral project explores the foodways of ancient Harappans from some of the selected settlements located in different geographical zones, like the Kutch region of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh. Within foodways, she aims to explore their dietary and ritual practices by examining the biomolecular components lying in the organic residues within ceramics used by the inhabitants of these settlements. Dietary studies are still in the embryonic phase in South Asian archaeology. Thus, conventional ceramic studies must be reassessed and augmented with the latest scientific methodologies and different nuances of food anthropology and cultural ecology to develop a broader view of ancient foodways at the site-specific and panoptic regional level for the subcontinent’s first complex society. For the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Ghosh is working on the methodological and interpretational part of her doctoral project and is combining analytical outcomes with food anthropological theoretical abstractions.

Shankar Gugoloth

Shankar Gugoloth is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant at the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. He completed his master’s in political science from the University of Hyderabad, Telangana, and his bachelor’s in technology in production engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli, Tamilnadu. Shankar’s research interests include youth studies, education, youth aspirations, and politics. His work also elucidates the concept of “becoming” and the aspirations of marginalised youth through the idea of SWAEROS. In the past, Shankar held a senior tech associate position at the Bank of America, Hyderabad, for three years. His passion for social science led him to move from engineering to social science. He has written blogposts on various websites and presented his works at several national and international conferences.

Shankar’s doctoral thesis explores the question of the construction and cultivation of various identities within the single social category SWAEROS/ “The Society” students. He looks at aspiration formations among Dalit and tribal college-going youth (boys and girls) in Telangana, particularly among students enrolled in the Telangana Social Welfare Educational Institute Society (TSWREIS) schools in southern India. His doctoral work is ethnographic and uses visual ethnography to understand youth aspirations. TSWREIS is a state government-funded group of residential educational institutions for Dalit and tribal students in the state of Telangana.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, Shankar is engaging with some of the alumni of TSWREIS, to gain valuable insights into the experiences of marginalized students from the “Society” schools studying or working in the U.S. This will help him to explore the role of TSWREIS in shaping aspirations of marginalized communities, and collaboratively write and interpret an ethnographic account of youth aspirations and state engagement with the marginalized community.

Naorem Kiranmala Devi

Dr. Naorem Kiranmala Devi currently serves as an Associate Professor at the University of Delhi. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Delhi.

Her research focuses on demographic and genomic variations among populations, particularly in India’s northeast region. Dr. Devi specializes in nutritional anthropology, biochemical genetics, and molecular anthropology. Through her research initiatives she has extensively explored the population specific risk factors of cardio-metabolic disorders in India along with the associated genetic and epigenetic alterations. With substantial experience in academia, she has contributed to course development, conference organization, and research administration. She has published over 40 research articles and book chapters, exploring diverse topics such as cardiovascular health, genetic polymorphisms, epigenetic studies, and socio-cultural determinants of health. Additionally, she actively engages in community service, particularly in raising awareness about health issues such as thalassemia and hypertension through outreach programs and screening camps.

Dr. Kiranmala’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project aims to identify and understand the implicit cultural components of the hypertension management programs in the U.S. and India, and work with local experts to explore ways to develop a culturally appropriate intervention module for the management of hypertension in high-risk communities of Punjab, India.