Episode #15: Akhil Gupta with Sam Balaton-Chrimes

Conversations in Anthropology

We are firmly in our teens now, back in your feed with Episode 16. In this episode, David is accompanied in his hosting duties by Sam Balaton-Chrimes, Lecturer in Politics at Deakin University. Their guest is Akhil Gupta, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and also a visiting Professor of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Melbourne. This episode, like Akhil's work, explores questions of transnational capitalism, infrastructure, and corruption, primarily in India. Akhil’s work has become required reading across the discipline, interrogating anthropological theory from the margins, drawing on critiques of development, postcoloniality, globalization, and the state. Most recently, he has been investigating the phenomenon of the call centre and what it can tell us about the future of global capitalism. He has written and edited numerous books including Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Duke University Press, 1998), to most recently Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Duke University Press, 2012).