Middle East Studies

Sample Announcement 3

September 4, 2016

Vikramaditya Thakur completed his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Yale University in 2014. His doctoral dissertation studied the forced relocation of Bhils, a hill community in rural western India, to resettlement colonies in the plains by the state due to one of the largest dams in the world. The dissertation analyzed both forced displacement and the subsequent resettlement not as a one-off event but as an intergenerational phenomenon mediated by democratic processes and social movements, and divergent aspirations across generations in families. His subsequent fieldwork studied the integration and transformation of the resettled Bhils as they got embedded in an economy marked by cash-crop agriculture from an earlier one based on subsistence farming. His research interests include development studies, political anthropology, agrarian studies, and environmental and social history.