Nobody's People | Anastasia Piliavsky

Nobody's People: Hierarchy as Hope in a Society of Thieves

Why do so many in India, the world’s most famously hierarchical society, continue to live with such drive and hope? And why do those long seen as “subjugated” embrace hierarchy instead of fleeing from it?
Drawing on years of ethnographic research among the Kanjars, a community of professional bandits in Rajasthan, Nobody’s People shows hierarchy not as oppression or dead weight but as a vital logic of care and responsibility. It is through hierarchical bonds — of patrons and clients, elders and juniors, parents and children — that people most effectively assert worth, carve out freedoms, and pursue ambitions. Without such ties, one risks not only exclusion but social obliteration — the fate of “nobody’s people.”
By showing hierarchy to be the opposite of social stasis — a generative moral grammar through which people imagine, hope for, and advance better lives — the book challenges the egalo-normative commitments of contemporary social science, exposing blind spots that extend far beyond rural India.

Published in 2020 by Stanford University Press

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Joel Robbins

Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge

An extraordinary work. A major rethinking of the social productivity of hierarchical relations, this is ethnographically grounded anthropological theorizing at its best. It should fundamentally transform contemporary conversations about the nature of social life.

Marilyn Strathern

William Professor of Social Anthropology, Emerita, at the University of Cambridge

It's difficult to overemphasize the effect of this narrative: the brio with which it is written, the verve of its characters, the author's intellectual panache. This scintillating re-reading of hierarchy, most poignant where it has supposedly been banished, picks apart one of anthropology's greatest conundrums and poses profound questions for evaluations based on social equivalence.

Dilip Menon

Mellon Chair in Indian Studies and Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand

Piliavsky puts forward a courageous, refreshingly original position on hierarchy.

Filippo Osella

Sussex University

This compelling study of a "caste of thieves" addresses one of the most important debates in the sociology of South Asia.