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

Hierarchy as a Democratic Value in India (with comments & a rejoinder)

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; introduction to a special section “Elementary Forms of Political Life,” with Judith Scheele.

Towards a Critical Ethnography of Political Concepts

All too often political analysts rely on the categories of Western Political Theory, which often has little local traction. In this article we show what such external frames miss, sketching out the vast worlds that open when we dare to think with the concepts that people themselves use in their political lives.

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

India's Little Political Tradition

In this little essay 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—that reproduces devotion to local gods in popular Hinduism—acts as a brake, keeping catastrophe at bay. So far.

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 law, and what it reveals about the nature of law, order, and politics at its centre.

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 A. Shryock & J. 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 & 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 oppressive feudal residue—anchors political life as a moral good. From Trump’s America to Zulu homesteads and Brazilian backlands, people do not seek out equals, but look for responsible superiors, unsettling the received belief that all humans pursue equality as a basic moral good. 

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 anarchism as violent “anti-action.” While Graeber yearns for total liberation from rules, institutions and states, I argue that bureaucracy, far from mere tedium, is a socially constitutive ritual: personal, political, and creative, as much a source of order as of tedium and 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

This article overturns the common belief that the British “invented” India’s criminal tribes. Drawing on Sanskrit and vernacular sources, it shows that long before colonial law, Indian texts already cast certain communities as hereditary bands of thieves—secretive, deviant, yet essential to statecraft. The study reveals how colonial categories echoed much older indigenous ideas of criminality.

Contributions to Indian Sociology 49/2: 135-61, 2015

Patronage & Community in a Society of Thieves

This ethnography shows how a community of thieves in Rajasthan lives through patronage. Divine and human patrons alike shape their identity, give moral sanction, and sustain their trade. Theft is not just crime but a social vocation, made possible by ties to gods, chiefs, landlords, and neighbours who make the community what it is.

Anthropology Today 31/4: 22-25, 2015

India's Human Democracy

This essay makes the breakthrough claim that Indian democracy works through hierarchy, not against it. Drawing on ethnography of politicians, brokers, and voters in Rajasthan, it shows how obligations, patronage, and unequal ties animate participation. Far from undermining democracy, these hierarchies are what make it thrive at the world’s largest scale.

American Ethnologist 42/2: 787-88, 2015

Jeffrey Witsoe's Democracy Against Development

In this review of Jeffrey Witsoe’s Democracy against Development, I argue that Bihar shows democracy can thrive against the state. Witsoe’s ethnography of lower-caste politics reveals that India’s most fervent democracy flourished not through bureaucratic order or development, but in defiance of them—posing a radical challenge to the idea that strong democracies need strong states.

In Patronage as Politics in South Asia, ed. A. Piliavsky. Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-36, 2014.

Introduction to Patronage as Politics in South Asia

This book argues that patronage is not democracy’s opposite but its normative logic in South Asia. Far from a feudal residue, it is the living moral idiom that makes politics work—structuring relations of generosity and obligation, shaping representation, and showing how democracy here thrives through hierarchy rather than despite it.

In Patronage as Politics in South Asia, ed. A. Piliavsky. Cambridge University Press, pp. 154-75, 2014.

India’s Demotic Democracy and Its “Depravities” In the Ethnographic Longue Durée

This chapter shows that Indian democracy runs not despite but through patronage. Electoral feasts, gifts, and obligations are not mere “vote-buying” but expressions of a normative moral order in which leaders are bread-givers and citizens their clients. Patronage here is democracy’s logic, not its pathology—what makes mass participation vibrant, accountable, and enduring. In principle, at least.

H-Net Reviews, 2014.

India’s Non-Sovereign Kings. Review of Aya Ikegame’s Princely India Reimagined.

In this review of Aya Ikegame’s Princely India Re-imagined, I argue that Mysore’s history shows kingship in India was never about sovereignty, as the British tried to make it, but about patronage, ritual, and moral duty. Even stripped of formal power, Mysore’s rulers continued to rule through gifts, honors, and encompassing ties.

Modern Asian Studies 47/3: 751-79, 2013.

The Moghia Menace, or the Watch Over Watchmen in British India

This article overturns the standard view that “criminal tribes” were a British invention of 1871. It uncovers earlier legislation against the Moghias in Rajputana, driven not by London but by local rulers and agents. The campaign shows how criminal tribe policy emerged bottom-up, through indigenous policing politics, rather than imposed top-down by empire.

Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 31/2: 104-22, 2013.

Where Is the Public Sphere? Political Communication and the Morality of Disclosure in Rural Rajasthan

This article challenges the idea that India’s democracy flourishes in a “public sphere.” Ethnography from Rajasthan shows that visibility silences rather than enables speech. Effective political communications take place in secrecy, behind screens and in closed circles. The public sphere, in any Habermasian sense, may not exist here at all.

Borderland Lives in NorthErinSouth Asia, ed. D. Gellner. Duke UP, 24-45, 2013.

Borders Without Borderlands: On the Social Reproduction of State Demarkation in Western India.

This article challenges the romantic idea of “porous” borderlands. Focusing on India’s internal frontiers, it shows how boundaries are not softened by everyday life but hardened and reproduced in intimate practice—through suspicion, policing, and routine encounters. Borderlanders are not cosmopolitan brokers but subjects living within, and making do with, the matrix of state borders.

Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopaedia, ed. J. McGee & R. L. Warms. Sage, 465-68, 2013.

Edmund R. Leach

This piece shows why Edmund Leach mattered—not as the founder of a “school” but as anthropology’s great unsettling force. It explains what made Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism so powerful, and how Leach harnessed its force—never dogmatically—to make anthropology a dissident discipline, pursuing honest knowledge against received notions and common sense, insisting theory serve ethnography, never the reverse.

Comparative Studies in Society & History, 53/2: 290-313, 2011.

A Secret in the Oxford Sense: Thieves and the Rhetoric of Mystification in Western India.

This essay asks what makes a “secret” socially powerful. Through an ethnography of Rajasthan’s “caste of thieves,” it shows how secrecy isn’t about hidden content but about mystification itself—circulated in gossip, police files, and self-presentation—revealing how the hidden sustains public order, authority, and the very idea of the state.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1/1: 279-98, 2011. 

Edmund R. Leach’s 1982 Frazer Lecture “Kingship & Divinity,’ ed.

This is the first publication of the late Edmund Leach’s celebrated 1982 Frazer Lecture. It revisits Frazer’s conjectures on divine kingship, myth, and sacrifice, asking what links gods and kings and how Christianity’s story fits this wider frame. Leach’s argument shows anthropology’s power: revealing myth as lived precedent and kingship as fragile, ritually renewed divinity.