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Academic Background:

I have a strongly interdisciplinary background in research and teaching. After my Ph.D. in political science (University of Leipzig, Germany), I started to emphasize economic history and the anthropology of markets and work at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Gottingen, Germany, and the International Institute of Asian Studies, University of Leiden, Netherlands. My main research focus has been on extra-legal markets, informal financial practices and the history of banking, money lending and chit funds, and the history and anthropology of labour in commercial segments of the Indian economy.

Current Projects:

Work in the ‘Bazaar’ – The Organization of Work in an Urban Milieu beyond State Regulation, 1960s to the Present Abstract: This project is intended as the corollary to my habilitation project (outlined below) and follows a similar methodological approach: Having observed the production of (enclaves of) informality in urban northern India through the interplay of market framing processes and social responses to these from its entrepreneurial dimension, the project addresses the question of ‘informalization’ of labor and work relations in the ‘bazaar’ of the north Indian city of Banaras (Varanasi), an urban arena marked by the interplay of a procedurally defined modernity with the socio-spatial grid and informational order of a ‘traditional’ commercial entrepôt and retail center. It combines a historiography of labor based on a range of locally acquired sources, including a significant body of documents from (increasingly dysfunctional) informal sector trade unions operating in the ‘bazaar’ and local traders’ association materials since the 1960s, with an ethnographic enquiry into organizational patterns of labor and work conditions. Debt in Banaras – Informal Finance, Transgressive Entrepreneurship, and the Production of a Monetary Outside in a North Indian Town Abstract: This project combines a contemporary history of market framing processes in India with an in-depth ethnographic study of social responses to these in an urban environment, both in the form of adjustments and evasions. Essentially, the project contrasts the development and attempted imposition of a procedurally circumscribed modernity in (socio-)economic relations with the everyday practices of asserting, contesting, and negotiating rules in an urban environment marked by a multiplicity of sovereignties. The project studies the production of both procedurally and spatially bounded extra-legal (and frequently illegal) monetary markets, related to both credit and speculation, through the interplay of these factors. Relying primarily on the study of the evolution of money lending and related practices in the north Indian city of Banaras (Varanasi) since the late colonial period, the project seeks to address the topic of ‘informalization’ from its entrepreneurial dimension.

Experience

Work Experience:

Research

Journal Publications: