Aarti Sethi

Assistant Researcher 2020-2021

Assistant Professor 2021 -

Profile

I am a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political-economy and the study of South Asia. I hold degrees in political science, and cinema and cultural studies, from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. I received my Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 2017. Before joining Berkeley, I had postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Brown universities.

Special Interests

Agrarian Anthropology; Rural Life; Feminist Anthropology; Political Economy; Comparative Religion; South Asia; Debt and Capitalism; Cinema and Media Culture; Ecstatic Experience, Embodiment and Aesthetics; Theories of Mind, Language and Subjectivity; Caste, Structural Violence and Socio-Economic Inequality.

Research

Aarti Sethi is assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political-economy, and the study of South Asia. Her research interests broadly focus on the transformation of rural life-worlds and agrarian capitalism. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a book that examines cash-crop agricultural economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social, and productive relations in rural society. She is particularly concerned with understanding the political economies of small-holder agrarian production in the era of climate change. Her second project called Republic of Readers explores the relationship between reading literacy and libraries as sites of postcolonial democracy and citizenship. Alongside her research in agrarian anthropology she is interested in the social life of agrarian technology, the politics of knowledge and literacy, the anthropology of religion, the history of anthropological thought, multi-species ethnography, and bringing archives and ethnography together. She has previously published in urban ethnography, cinematic, media and visual cultures. Sethi holds degrees in political science, and cinema and cultural studies, from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. Prior to joining UC Berkeley she held postdoctoral fellowships at Brown and Harvard university. 

Representative Publications

“Ritual as image: Materiality, social history, and the gendered economies of agrarian capitalism in central India”, American Ethnologist (forthcoming).


“Terms of Trade and the Cost of Cotton: The Paradox of Commercial Agriculture in India”, Special Forum, Journal of Peasant Studies, Volume 48:1 (2021), pp. 1397-1408.


“One Year Later: Reflections on the Farmer’s Movement in India,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Vol 11: No 1 (2021), pp. 869-876.


“Mahadev’s Gift: Men, Bullocks and The Community of Cultivation in Central India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. (2019) 42:6, 1173-1191.

“The Pyre and The Stove,” Public Books, (2018).


“Toward a Readers’ Uprising: Reflections in the Wake of Assaults on Books and Authors in Today’s India”, with Shuddhabrata Sengupta, India Review, 13:3, 290-299, (2014).


“Politics and Cultures of Cinema: Delhi 1920-1940.” Critical Studies in Politics, ed. Nivedita Menon, Aditya Nigam and Sanjay Palshikar, Orient Blackswan, (2013).


 “The Apparel of Anxiety.” Sarai Reader 08: Fear, ed. Sarai Editorial Collective, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, (2009).


“The Currency of Character: Black-marketing of Cinema Tickets in 1950s Delhi,” Seminar special issue “Circuits of Cinema,” ed. Aarti Sethi, (2009).


“The Honorable Murder: The Trial of Kawas Maneckshaw Nanavati.” Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, ed. Sarai Editorial Collective, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, (2005). 

Editorial

“Circuits of Cinema” special issue of Seminar, no. 598, June 2009 (with critical introduction). 

Book Manuscript

Cotton Fever in Central India (in preparation).