Current Anthropology 64/5: 581-98, 2023.

Hierarchy as a Democratic Value in India

Much of India’s democratic engagement thrives on hierarchical—rather than egalitarian—norms. This forum article draws on wide-ranging ethnography to show how asymmetrical social conventions of patronal care and deference shape the country's democratic life, a fact all too often obscured by the analysts' own egalitarian prejudices. Here you can find the article alongside its discussion and my rejoinder.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 12/3: 686-700, 2022; with Judith Scheele 

Towards a Critical Ethnography of Political Concepts

All too often political analysts lean on Western categories that have little local traction. In this article we show what such frames miss, sketching out the vast worlds that open when we dare to think with the concepts that people themselves invoke in their political lives.

Political Theology 25/2: 130-36, 2022.

India's Little Political Tradition

I tackle one of India’s great political puzzles: despite more than a decade of Hindu-nationalist rule, mass political violence has not erupted. Attacks on Christians and Muslims remain sporadic, never cascading into pogroms. I argue that the deeply local logic of political relations—mirroring Hindu devotion to local gods—acts as a brake, keeping catastrophe at bay.

Comparative Studies in Society and History 12/3: 686-700, 2019.

Crooked Jurisdictions

In conversation with Gregory Feldman, Pál Nyíri, and Jatin Dua, I explore what is distinctive about life on the margins of the law, and what it reveals about the nature of law, order, and politics at its center.

Anthropology of This Century 24, 2019.Review of Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler

Inequality or Death

Scheidel’s sweeping history shows death and violence to be the great levelers of inequality. My review turns the lens the other way: after each catastrophe, hierarchy resurfaces with renewed force. Far from a temporary distortion, hierarchy proves itself an indelible feature of human life.

In The Scandal of Continuity in Middle East Anthropology, ed. by Shryock & Scheele, 2019.

Secrecy and Continuity in Rajasthan

Scheidel’s sweeping history shows death and violence to be the great levelers of inequality. My review turns the lens the other way: after each catastrophe, hierarchy resurfaces with renewed force. Far from a temporary distortion, hierarchy proves itself an indelible feature of human life.

Anthropology of This Century 21, 2018.Review of Aaron Ansell’s Zero Hunger and Jason Hickel's Democracy as Death

Egalitarian Fantasy and Politics in the Real World

In this review of Jason Hickel’s Democracy as Death and Aaron Ansell’s Zero Hunger, I show how hierarchy—often dismissed as patronage or feudal residue—anchors political life as a moral good. From Trump’s America to Zulu homesteads and Brazilian backlands, people seek not equals but superiors bound by responsibility, unsettling liberalism’s egalitarian fantasy.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7/3: 13-17, 2018.

Disciplinary Memory Against Ambient Pietism

In this polemic, I argue that anthropology’s loss of disciplinary memory has left it captive to presentist fashions and moral pieties. Against the monotony of recycled theory and advocacy dressed as analysis, I defend the classics as vital to anthropology’s radical insight: that human worlds are made of ideas, not things—a lesson contemporary anthropology forgets at its peril.

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 30: 107-11, 2017.Review of David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.

The Wrong Kind of Freedom?

In this review of David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules, I take up his anarchist assault on bureaucracy as violence and “anti-action.” While Graeber yearns for total liberation from rules and states, I argue that bureaucracy, far from mere tedium, is socially constitutive ritual: personal, political, and creative, as much a source of order as of oppression.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22/2: 373-91, 2016; with Tommaso Sbriccoli

The ethics of efficacy in north India’s goonda raj (rule of toughs)

Why do Indian voters back gangsters? Because they get things done. This article explains that choice through a moral logic of efficacy rather than virtue—a concept that now dominates the anthropology of moral life. In North India’s politics, action matters more than character. We call it an “ethics of efficacy”: a challenge to Western ideas of what makes power legitimate, and what makes people good.

Comparative Studies in Society & History 57/2: 323-54, 2015

The "Criminal Tribe" in India Before the British

Why do Indian voters back gangsters? Because they get things done. This article explains that choice through a moral logic of efficacy—not virtue. In North India’s politics, action matters more than character. We call it an “ethics of efficacy”—a challenge to Western ideas of what makes power legitimate, and what makes people good.