Sara Shneiderman at Yale University

Dr. Sara Shneiderman is a post-doctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at St. Catharine�s College in Cambridge University, England interested chiefly in the definition of contemporary ethnic identities through tracing intersections between ritual practices, cultural performances, cross-border migration, and political theory. She will be presenting a paper titled, “The �Lingering Effects� of Affirmative Action in Nepal and India: Cultural Practice, State Policy and Social Science� on September 15th, 2010. Dr. Shneiderman received her BA with Honors from Brown University with a dual major in both Anthropology and Religious Studies, after which she attended Cornell University, where she received her MA and Ph.D in Anthropology and completed her doctoral dissertation, an ethnography of the Thangmi entitled Rituals of Ethnicity: Migration, Mixture and the Making of Thangmi Identity Across Himalayan Borders. Her scholarship upon the interactions between the Himalayan communities present in Nepal, India, and China continued through her further research, resulting in several papers upon Nepal�s political movements, ethnic definitions, and affirmative action. Her recent publications include �The Formation of Political Consciousness in Rural Nepal,� in a special issue of Dialectical Anthropology entitled Ethnographies of Maoism in South Asia (33, 3-4: 287-308, 2009); �Ethnic (P)reservations: Comparing Thangmi Ethnic Activism in Nepal and India,� Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia (115-141, 2009); and her review of Tibetan Diary: From Birth to Death and Beyond in a Himalayan Valley of Nepal, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (16:201-202, 2010).

Beginning with her Fulbright Fellowship in Nepal in 2000, Dr. Shneiderman has been awarded several prestigious fellowships and grants, including the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in Anthropology from 2001-2006, the Sage Fellowship at Cornell University from 2007-2008, and culminating in her partnership in the British Academy in the UK-South Asia Sharing Partnership Award for her project Inequality and Affirmative Action in South Asia: Current Experiences and Future Agendas in India and Nepal from 2009-2011. In addition, Dr. Shneiderman has presented her papers internationally at conferences in Kathmandu, Nepal; Washington DC; Heidelberg, Germany, and over 30 other locations in the US, Europe, and Asia. She is a founding fellow of the Digital Himalaya Project at Cambridge University and is currently working on a monograph about the cultural politics involved in cross-border Thangmi identity. Before coming to Cambridge, she was a Teaching Fellow at the Cornell-Nepal Study Program, Adjunct Faculty at the School for International Training College Semester Abroad in Kathmandu. Presently she lectures for the POLIS paper at Cambridge on the History and Politics of South Asia, oversees Social Anthropology papers on Colonialism and Empire, and supervises postdoctoral and postgraduate students with interests in the anthropology of politics, borders, conflict, transnationalism, and Himalayan area studies, as well as other subjects.

In this talk, Dr. Shneiderman will examine the historical and contemporary policies and practices of affirmative action in India, and consider their implications for a federal Nepal as it drafts a new constitution. With ethnographic case studies of communities discussing these social strata, she will analyze how Other Backwards Class (OBC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) and Scheduled Caste (SC) social status in India, along with janajati and dalit status in Nepal, can generate identities. In conclusion, she will investigate the role of social science in this process through the actions of the state, activist organizations, and international agencies. Dr. Shneiderman is currently involved in the British Academy UK-South Asia Partnership Scheme, ‘Inequality and Affirmative Action in South Asia: Current Experiences and Future Agendas in India and Nepal’. She will be joining the Yale faculty as Assistant Professor of South Asian Anthropology in 2011.