Edward Simpson
I am interested in the anthropology of history, religion, and disaster; and the traditions of Indian Sociology.
Most of my research has been conducted in Gujarat, western India, with a particular focus on the regions of Kutch (also spelled Kachchh and Cutch) and Saurashtra.
Work in this area has taught me that ethnography is best framed by history and contemporary politics. For centuries, the region has been part of the cultural and economic networks of the Indian Ocean, while on land various experiments have been undertaken with truth, religious nationalism, and violence. Consequently, conceptions of borders, boundaries and identity feature strongly in my work.
I have written about the politics and social organisation of seafaring Muslims, their conceptions of self, learning, society and the political. In Gujarat, this has meant exploring their empirical and emotional connections to the broader Muslim world, as well as their relationship to Hindu nationalism and India.
I am currently completing a monograph on ‘What earthquakes make us think’. This work is based on research conducted over the last ten years on the consequences of devastating earthquake in Gujarat. Here, I am concerned with the sociology of the aftermath, rather than with the more straight-forward appraisal of development paradigms. I am particularly interested in the concentration and consequences of extreme emotions associated with catastrophic disaster, notably terror, the ‘sublime’, nostalgia and avarice, as well as in ideas about death, memory and retribution.
Recently, the ESRC has granted funding for a major project on the changing role of the village in post-colonial South Asia (2011-2014):
Rural change and anthropological knowledge in post-colonial India: A comparative 'restudy' of F.G. Bailey, Adrian C. Mayer and David Pocock
The project is led by myself and Patricia Jeffery (University of Edinburgh). The post-doctoral research team includes Tina Otten, Tommaso Sbriccoli and Alice Tilche.
The aim of the project is to 'restudy' villages studied in the 1950s by F.G. Bailey, Adrian Mayer and David Pocock in Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat respectively. The three went on to have distinguished careers as exponents of the post-colonial sociology of India.
It is uncommon for the work of living anthropologists to be re-examined by others. However, in 2009, Adrian Mayer wrote to SOAS actively encouraging a re-examination of his material. Later, F.G. Bailey was also enthusiastic about the idea. The two have agreed to share their original fieldnotes, discuss their lives and works, and to act as honorary consultants to the project.
When these anthropologists made the long journey to India, the children of newly-independent country were born into a world where there was no refrigeration, television or internet; there was no electricity for most. They could expect to live for an average of forty years. Metalled roads, combustion engines and plastics were rare. India had yet to go to war with Pakistan, and the IR8 rice seed of the so-called Green Revolution was over a decade away.
India has changed dramatically since then but the village has become a neglected topic in the study of the country. What happens in villages today? What has happened to caste, gender and political relations over the last sixty years? Is there still such a thing as an agrarian economy? How are new technologies changing rural life?
As far as we know, no comparative restudy has been undertaken of the work of other anthropologists, and, therefore, the project will hopefully open up space for new approaches and ideas in the anthropology of South Asia.
For more information about the project please visit the project webpages.
Most of my research has been conducted in Gujarat, western India, with a particular focus on the regions of Kutch (also spelled Kachchh and Cutch) and Saurashtra.
Work in this area has taught me that ethnography is best framed by history and contemporary politics. For centuries, the region has been part of the cultural and economic networks of the Indian Ocean, while on land various experiments have been undertaken with truth, religious nationalism, and violence. Consequently, conceptions of borders, boundaries and identity feature strongly in my work.
I have written about the politics and social organisation of seafaring Muslims, their conceptions of self, learning, society and the political. In Gujarat, this has meant exploring their empirical and emotional connections to the broader Muslim world, as well as their relationship to Hindu nationalism and India.
I am currently completing a monograph on ‘What earthquakes make us think’. This work is based on research conducted over the last ten years on the consequences of devastating earthquake in Gujarat. Here, I am concerned with the sociology of the aftermath, rather than with the more straight-forward appraisal of development paradigms. I am particularly interested in the concentration and consequences of extreme emotions associated with catastrophic disaster, notably terror, the ‘sublime’, nostalgia and avarice, as well as in ideas about death, memory and retribution.
Recently, the ESRC has granted funding for a major project on the changing role of the village in post-colonial South Asia (2011-2014):
Rural change and anthropological knowledge in post-colonial India: A comparative 'restudy' of F.G. Bailey, Adrian C. Mayer and David Pocock
The project is led by myself and Patricia Jeffery (University of Edinburgh). The post-doctoral research team includes Tina Otten, Tommaso Sbriccoli and Alice Tilche.
The aim of the project is to 'restudy' villages studied in the 1950s by F.G. Bailey, Adrian Mayer and David Pocock in Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat respectively. The three went on to have distinguished careers as exponents of the post-colonial sociology of India.
It is uncommon for the work of living anthropologists to be re-examined by others. However, in 2009, Adrian Mayer wrote to SOAS actively encouraging a re-examination of his material. Later, F.G. Bailey was also enthusiastic about the idea. The two have agreed to share their original fieldnotes, discuss their lives and works, and to act as honorary consultants to the project.
When these anthropologists made the long journey to India, the children of newly-independent country were born into a world where there was no refrigeration, television or internet; there was no electricity for most. They could expect to live for an average of forty years. Metalled roads, combustion engines and plastics were rare. India had yet to go to war with Pakistan, and the IR8 rice seed of the so-called Green Revolution was over a decade away.
India has changed dramatically since then but the village has become a neglected topic in the study of the country. What happens in villages today? What has happened to caste, gender and political relations over the last sixty years? Is there still such a thing as an agrarian economy? How are new technologies changing rural life?
As far as we know, no comparative restudy has been undertaken of the work of other anthropologists, and, therefore, the project will hopefully open up space for new approaches and ideas in the anthropology of South Asia.
For more information about the project please visit the project webpages.
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Books by Edward Simpson
Most of what is generally known about disasters is produced by those who have a stake in presenting the clear up and reconstruction as rip-roaring successes. The reports produced by development agencies and governments are generally not about failure, any more than they are about the lives of ordinary people: discourses are practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak. Conventional discourses and ways of speaking and writing about disasters serve particular ends and make disasters appear in particular ways. These ways are not always the most beneficial to those suffering, nor perhaps are they the most logical, if indeed the aim of humanitarian assistance is to aid others. My focus on the everyday life of the aftermath goes someway to counter these routinized biases.
This book presents a disaster from a novel perspective: we look out of the ruins and into the faces and at the ideas of those who came to intervene. What if we take this perspective seriously? What if we look at the activities of the humanitarians as if they are powerful strangers or trespassers? Then, their actions no longer seem so routinely sensible or so morally untouchable. On the contrary, what they do may often appear as self-interested impositions on those suffering…
Gujarat has been in the international news a great deal in the last decade. There have been dramatic and fatal attacks on temples and trains and more widespread violence in the state in 2002. These events have attracted volumes of critical attention, far more so than the earthquake which received little after the dust had settled. These incidents took place primarily in the east of Gujarat, but deeply coloured earthquake reconstruction in the west.
The current Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, has described how the ‘backward region’ demolished by the disaster now resembles Singapore. While the comparison is jingoistic, the sentiment it contains is revealing because it plays on a widespread and growing sense in Gujarat that intensive infrastructural and industrial development is straight-forwardly super… The land in which Gandhi was born and developed his ideas, the ‘land of will and wisdom’, has become a land of ‘unstoppable growth’, ‘development’ and smoke stacks. In India, this form of post-earthquake industry-led development has become known as the ‘Gujarat Model’. This is a political model, forged largely (but not only), during the period of post-earthquake reconstruction, in which the state focussed on building new infrastructure and expanding the industrial sector. It is very easily forgotten that at the time of the earthquake, the language and aims of high politics in Gujarat were very different. Then, ‘hatred’ and ‘terror’ were watchwords, rather than ‘industry’ and ‘progress’. India was still a few years away from ‘shining’. Muslims were routinely demonised because of their supposedly anti-national spirit.
These days, there is a concerted effort to promote the Chief Minister from his provincial seat of power in Gujarat to the leadership of India. As part of this move, Narendra Modi has lurched from the far-right to the centre-right of politics – the place where there are most votes at a national level. The firebrand moments of his rise are slowly being forgotten. Amid the things that might have been done well in Gujarat, it has largely been ignored that due to deliberate neglect state enterprises are making losses to the favour of the private sector profit, undue and gross favours have been granted to particular industrial houses, and the distribution of wealth is increasingly unequal. The focus on industrial growth, so-called ‘development’, has led to a relative decline in the conditions of the poorer sections of society.
The story of the earthquake might be read as allegory for ten years of politics in Gujarat. The earthquake brought the Chief Minister directly to office. In a variety of ways, he and his advisors have successfully harnessed its reverberating powers. Political and moral ideas, which make it appear only sensible but to vote and think in particular ways, have been ground hard into the fabric of society through the institutions of a democratic state in the name of post-earthquake reconstruction. In this, the supine aid of international financial institutions such as the development banks has been instrumental. While the book I have written is unequivocally about the aftermath of a ‘natural’ disaster, it might also be read profitably as an alternative political biography: the ‘Gujarat Model’ at the grassroots.
The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text critically examines the processes that went into the formation of the region and in the process unsettles a series of conventional wisdoms about the land and its inhabitants. Individual chapters examine the work of courts, colonial officers, politicians, scholars and gods and goddesses in the making of the state. As a whole, the book provides a broad introduction to the idea of Gujarat, the scope of its history, the nature of its politics, and the dynamics of its society.
It will be of use to students and scholars interested in the study of Gujarat, and to those concerned with wider questions of identity formation, colonial and post-colonial knowledge practices, and contemporary politics.
The reader is however also encouraged to treat the references as artefacts of power – each entry playing some role in the way we have come to know what we know about Gujarat today. Writing often has a social life, entertaining relations with other texts, with other authors, and with a readership. Annotations pointing to some of these connections are provided, especially when titles are uninformative, argument, data or provenance notable, or when serendipity has demanded. In this respect, the text can be read to trace the genealogy of certain ideas, regional traditions and preoccupations in the literature. Taken as a whole, the book can be read creatively as an alternative form of regional history, as a condensation of the literature from which current ideas about Gujarat have been formed.
The book also contains a substantial introduction based on new and original research on the key themes in the literature on Gujarat and how these themes spill into popular politics and life in the region at present.
Society and History of Gujarat since 1800: A Select Bibliography of the English and European Language Sources is an invaluable guide to anyone interested in modern Gujarat, an audience which will include activists, administrators, scholars, students and others with critically informed minds.
Conferences by Edward Simpson
Papers by Edward Simpson