Yu Luo - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

For Shivi, a most encouraging mentor

When I think about my first conversation with Shivi — a phone interview for the doctoral program — I remember how little I actually knew about anthropology. I had read exactly one book in environmental anthropology, and I mentioned it, knowing how thin that was. What I remember most is that Shivi didn’t seem to mind. He was warm, curious, encouraging. He took my half-formed thinking seriously and made me feel as though I belonged in a conversation I was only beginning to understand.

That generosity turned out to be characteristic. Over the years that followed — as he guided me through foundational coursework, organized the Environmental Anthropology Collective (EAC), and folded me into Agrarian Studies — Shivi’s belief in me never wavered, even in the stretches when my belief in myself did. His support was never just verbal. He pushed me toward opportunities, looped me into conversations with peers and senior scholars, and made sure I had places to think out loud. The EAC became one of the most formative spaces of my graduate years: it was where I workshopped my first ever journal article, where we rehearsed mock job talks and traded feedback on applications, and where I made friendships that have outlasted Yale and continue to sustain me. Shivi understands that intellectual development happens in community, and he works quietly to build that community around his students.

His feedback was the same way: generous, but never vague. Comments on my writing were always concrete — pointed where they needed to be, expansive where there was room to grow. He had a particular way of pushing me to situate my work within broader currents of twenty-first century social change in rural Asia, even when I was writing about something as quotidian as the everyday production of culture and ethnicity in a remote corner of southwest China. He never let me forget that the small things are where the big questions live. When he served as a reader right before I graduated, the suggestions he offered for moving forward with the dissertation were, in hindsight, remarkably prescient. He saw the shape of the project — and maybe of me as a scholar — more clearly than I could at the time.

One image I’ll always carry is Shivi in seminars and colloquiums: leaning back in his chair, closing his eyes, quiet for long stretches, looking for all the world as if he might be elsewhere. You were never quite sure what he was doing — until he chose to chime in, and then out came something so lucid and incisive that you’d carry it with you for days. He never needed to dominate a room to shape it. His influence was subtle in the way that the most lasting ones usually are.

There’s a small memory I’ve never quite let go of: somewhere in grad school, I forgot an appointment with him. I spent the rest of the day spiraling. When I finally faced him, he was completely unbothered — gracious, warm, ready to reschedule, as if it were nothing. It was nothing, to him. But that small moment told me something: he is just steady, all the way through.

Shivi’s care didn’t end at graduation. He has followed my career with the same quiet attentiveness. That kind of advising — generous, durable, unconditional — is rare, and I feel lucky beyond measure to have been on the receiving end of it.

Thank you, Shivi. For the encouragement on that first phone call, for every concrete comment in every margin since, for the community you built around us, and for the steady, quiet faith that made the whole thing possible. I wish you a retirement as rich and generative as the career you’re concluding — and I hope you know how many of us will keep exploring the questions you taught us to ask, long after the office hours end. 

With deepest gratitude, 

Yu Luo 

Barnett Chair in Contemporary China Studies  

and Associate Professor of Anthropology 

University of Puget Sound 

Yale Anthropology, PhD 2016