Professor Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani of Anthropology Stanford University
Founder and directed Stanford’s Center for South Asia from 2010 to 2017
Thomas Hansen is an anthropologist of political life, ethno-religious identities, violence and urban life in South Asia and Southern Africa. He has multiple theoretical and disciplinary interests from political theory and continental philosophy to psychoanalysis, comparative religion and contemporary urbanism.
Much of professor Hansen’s early fieldwork was done during the tumultuous and tense years in the beginning of the 1990s when conflicts between Hindu militants and Muslims defined national agendas and produced frequent violent clashes in the streets. Out of this work came two books: The Saffron Wave. Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton 1999) which explores the larger phenomenon of Hindu nationalism in the light of the dynamics of India’s democratic experience, and Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton 2001) which explores the historical processes and identity formations that gave rise to violent socioreligious conflict and the renaming of the city in 1995.
Dr. Thomas Hansen will guide the Democracy and the problem of public authority workshop together with Dr. Helene Risor from School Anthropology Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
