Soumhya Venkatesan

Additional Information

I welcome enquiries from PhD and Master's candidates interested in the Anthropology of Ethics, Materiality, right-wing politics, Hinduism, and decolonisation.

PhD (Social Anthropology) Cambridge 2002.

MPhil (Social Anthropology) Cambridge

MA (History of Art) National Museum Institute, New Delhi, India.

BA (History) Women's Christian College, Madras, India.

Research interests:

Craft, development and paradoxes: My doctoral research focused on a group of Muslim weavers in South India and their engagement with development. As 'traditional craft producers', the weavers are celebrated within the Indian nation, as poor Muslims, they are marginalised and treated with a certain amount of suspicion. How they then used the objects they weave to negotiate this paradoxical state of affairs was one of my research questions. This work has led to a number of publications including my monograph Craft Matters: Artisans, Development and the Indian Nation (2009, Orient Blackswan).

Persons and Things: My second major research project (from 2009) took my interest in the agency of objects, questions of intentionality and causality further. I am now working with ritual sculptors and potters in India who make images that become gods that are worshipped. Through my focus is on the transformation of stone or clay into god, expert processes and knowledge practices, I asked how a thing becomes a god and how this can illuminate our understandings of relations between different kinds of entities and the ways in which differences or similarities between persons and things are conceptualised.

Freedom and the Right: During fieldwork with Hindu priests, I became interested in soteriological freedom and the ethical and practical disciplines undertaken by renouncers to free their souls from the cycle of rebirths. Partly informed by my doctoral work on the growing Hindu Right and in line with my interest in freedom and ethics, I began work with right-wing English libertarians in 2015. I conducted an ethnographic exploration of the  concept of freedom and its centrality in small-state political visions of a liberal and libertarian nature. I thus explored activism centred on Brexit, market freedoms and personal liberties.

Decolonisation: My work with right-wing actors led me to think that an activist model for anthropology can lead to the neglect of work with dominant groups, trends and ideologies that are currently shaping the world in which we live. This denudes the discipline of its explanatory power. This, as well as other carguments are to be found in my critical yet sympathetic work on decolonisation in, of and by anthropology (Decolonizing Anthropology, Polity 2024).

Philosophy in the world and worldly philosophy: My most recent research focuses on participatory democracy and the attempt to create thoughtful publics through ethnographic work with a community philosophy movement in England. I ask what philosophy looks like when practiced with a 'working class ethos' outside the academy. What kind of world is sought to be built through the disciplined practices of thinking and speaking together?