HISTORIES OF INTIMACY AND SITUATED ETHNOGRAPHY

Celebrating the world of Sylvia Vatuk, this volume highlights the intimate relationship between anthropology and history. The nine essays in this volume are authored by a range of scholars—anthropologists, historians, and folklorists—who have been inspired and influenced by Sylvia Vatuk’s extensive corpus of work on these disciplinary intersections as explored through her research on kinship and family history, gender, aging and the life cycle, and politics and the law. The essays critically examine and extend Vatuk’s contributions to such intersections of historical and ethnographic work, exploring anew the ways in which constructions of culture are inextricably tied to specific historical and political contexts. The essays also stress the implications of such situated knowledge for contemporary understandings of history, culture, and politics in present-day India.