Andrew McDowell - Entangled Collectives: Recombining People and Clouds in Rural Rajasthan

Though clouds typically float high above human concern, they have a long literary and poetic history in South Asia. Across that history they often carry messages and connect people. In Southeast Rajasthan wispy yellow clouds have the potential to reveal secrets about the self. Constantly changing, clouds have also long evaded the colonial and postcolonial impulses to stabilize and categorize social life through structures like caste and kin. This talk engages instances when clouds affect people’s breathing to reveal unknown moral qualities and potential social connection. It highlights the ways of knowing and experiencing social life that move between, and sometimes reorder, rigid and inherited social categories. Viewed as amorphously entangled with the social, cloud affected people inspire a reconsideration of the taxonomical categories that social scientists and everyday people use to make sense of themselves and others in South Asia. They call us to engage that which moves between people and structures.

Andrew McDowell is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University. He has a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from Harvard University. His research interests focus on care, contagion, pharmaceuticals, diagnosis, and inequality in North and Western Indian social worlds entangled with tuberculosis. His book, Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India, traces the complex relationships between development, disease, inequality, and biomedicine to theorize atmospheric but life changing connections forged by breath. Breathless won the AIIS’s 2023 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. His work also has appeared in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Ethos, Biosocieties, and The Lancet among other venues.