| Office | NAH 305 |
|---|---|
| Office Tel. | 3943 7676 |
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| Educational qualification | Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, USA M.A., University of Hyderabad, India M.A./Specialist, Russian State University for the Humanities, Russia |
Introduction
I am a cultural anthropologist who is interested in the experiences of cultural difference and belonging in two distinct contexts: transnational migration to Hong Kong and alternative medicine in India. In my book project “Doctors, the guru, and the nation: Disentangling medical pluralism and medical ideologies in contemporary India,” I explore the hierarchical divisions and mutual entanglements among alternative medical systems such as ayurveda, unani, yoga, homeopathy, and other traditions. I examine how doctors and patients navigate the plurality of medical traditions, often in reference to their cultural, religious, and national identities. I also trace the changes in government medical policy and the commercialization of alternative medical products, particularly analyzing how ayurveda has become a transnational wellness industry. This work has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
My new project, “Precarious privilege of highly skilled transnational migrants: An ethnography of South Asian women expatriates in Hong Kong,” attempts to understand the intersectionality and conditionality of privilege. I explore the journeys and stories of professional women of South Asian heritage who travel to Hong Kong for work, which defies the more traditional representations of expats as white and male. While highly skilled and highly paid, these women often encounter challenges associated with their gendered responsibilities and racialization. In other words, I explore how class privilege in mobility is inflected by the local structures of difference. This project is funded by the Hong Kong University Grants Committee and it draws on two previous projects funded by the Direct Grants for Research, CUHK, where I focused on diverse experiences of belonging among local and migrant Indian women and men in Hong Kong.
Currently, I also lead an interdisciplinary initiative “Theorizing Race in and through Asia” sponsored by the Research Institute of the Humanities, CUHK. The initiative aims to foreground Asia as a critical terrain for understanding racialized relations and discourses that fall outside Euro-American analytical frameworks. This is a network of CUHK faculty, postgraduate students, and other Hong Kong scholars with a goal of exchanging ideas and producing new theoretical approaches and methods in examining racialization processes through distinctly Asian historical, ethnographic, legal, literary, and linguistic materials.
I welcome MPhil and PhD applicants of all backgrounds interested in either migration studies or medical anthropology.
Research interests
Highly skilled migration; racialization; gender; citizenship and belonging; nationalist discourse; medical anthropology; alternative medicine; wellness; anthropological theory; anthropology of India and Indian diaspora; South Asians in Hong Kong
Courses taught
ANTH 6010 Seminars in Anthropological Theory
ANTH 4330/5325 Medicine, Health, and Culture
ANTH 3324/5324 Indian Culture and Society
ANTH 3630/5631 Language, Symbols and Society
GENA 2192 Women, Men, and Culture
Current research
Transnational lives, identities, and mobilities of Indians in Hong Kong
Awards and grants
2025-2028 Early Career Scheme, the University Grants Committee: “Precarious privilege of highly skilled transnational migrants: An ethnography of South Asian women expatriates in Hong Kong”
2025-2027 Interdisciplinary Collaborative Project, The research Institute for the Humanities, CUHK: “Theorizing Race in and through Asia”
2021 Direct Grant for Research, Chinese University of Hong Kong. “‘I am not an expat, I am brown’: Racialized Subjectivities of High-earning Mobile Professionals from India in Hong Kong”
2020 Direct Grant for Research, Chinese University of Hong Kong: “Multiple Belonging and Acts of Citizenship among Indians in Hong Kong”
2017 Best Graduate Student Paper Award, from The Science and Medicine in South Asia (SMSA) Special Interest group of the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA), American Anthropological Association (AAA).
2016 Best Graduate Student Paper Prize, from The Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Integrative Medicine (CAM/IM) Special Interest group of the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA), American Anthropological Association (AAA).
2015 Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, The Wenner-Gren Foundation
2013 Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh
Membership
American Anthropological Association (Society for Cultural Anthropology, Society for Medical Anthropology, Society for Feminist Anthropology)
Medical Anthropology Young Scholars
Association of Medical Anthropology Russia
Hong Kong Anthropological Society
| 2021 | Medical pluralism. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (eds) F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez & R. Stasch. http://doi.org/10.29164/21medplural |
| 2020 | Khalikova, VR, Jin, M, Chopra, SS. Gender in Sustainability Research: Inclusion, Intersectionality, and Patterns of Knowledge Production. J Ind Ecol. 2020; 1– 13. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13095 |
| 2020 | A Local Genie in an Imported Bottle: Ayurvedic Commodities and Healthy Eating in North India. In Food, Culture, and Society DOI:10.1080/15528014.2020.1713429 |
| 2019 | Doctors of Plural Medicine, Knowledge Transmission, and Family Space in India. In Medical Anthropology, 10.1080/01459740.2019.1656621 |
| 2018 | Medicine and the Cultural Politics of National Belonging in Contemporary India: Medical Plurality or Ayurvedic Hegemony? In Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity, Special Issue: Indian Medical Traditions between State and Village: Representations, Encounters, Legitimizations, Exclusions. |
| 2017 | The Ayurveda of Baba Ramdev: Biomoral Consumerism, National Duty, and the Biopolitics of ‘Homegrown’ Medicine in India. In South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 40(1): 105–122. |
| 2009 | The World around the Extreme Sports Bicycle. In Youth Subcultures of Moscow, ed. Gromov, pp. 253–296 (in Russian) |
| 2008 | Ethnosocial Environment and Inter-Ethnic Relations in Bulava village, Ulchski district, Khabarovski krai. In RSUH Student Field Research, Vol. 3, pp. 60–76 (in Russian) |
| 2007 | Ethno-National Identity of Children and Teenagers of Bessarabian Bulgarians in Ukraine. RSUH Student Field Research, Vol. 2, pp. 30–39 (in Russian) |
| 2019 | Theresia Hofer. Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018, 286 pp. (pbk). In Asian Anthropology DOI: 10.1080/1683478X.2019.1583084 |
| 2017 | Commitment, Citation, and Context: An interview with Bharat Jayram Venkat. Cultural Anthropology, August 11 (co-authored with Ned Dostaler) |
| 2017 | Teaching with Digital Technologies: In-Class Applications. Cultural Anthropology, June 2 |
| 2017 | Teaching with Digital Technologies: An Introduction to a Series of posts. Cultural Anthropology, April 24. |
| 2016 | Book review: Naraindas, Harish, Johannes Quack, and William S. Sax (eds.) 2014. Asymmetrical Conversations: Contestations, Circumventions, and the Blurring of Therapeutic Boundaries. Berghahn Books. In Social Anthropology, 24(2), pp. 269–270 |
| 2016 | The Chemical Refrain, an #AmAnthro Panel Review for Cultural Anthropology |
| 2014 | Book review: Lock, Margaret and V-K Nguyen. 2010. An Anthropology of Biomedicine. In Medical Anthropology and Bioethics, Vol. 7 (in Russian and English) |
| 2019 | Healthy Food, Taste and Identity: Thinking About the Transformation of Ayurveda in a Globalized India. At the Hong Kong Anthropological Society, March 22. |
| 2018 | Strengthening the Body and the Nation through Traditional Medicine and Biomoral Consumption in India. At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, March 2. |
| 2017 | “Plural Medicine and Nationalism in Contemporary India.” At Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA. April 12 |
| 2016 | “Medical Systems in Anthropological Theory and Indian Politics.” Invited lecture at Centre for Medical Anthropology, the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, June 21 |
| 2015 | “Language, Politics, and the Hierarchy of Institutionalized Plural Medicine in North India.” At Center for Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India, April 21 |
| 2020 | (conference canceled) Co-organizer: “Practices of Citizenship and Belonging among ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Asian Migrants.” At the Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference, March, Boston. |
| 2017 | Chair: “Patients and Healers in South Asia: New Epistemologies, Professional Dilemmas, and Responses to Modernity”. At the 46th Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin Madison, October 28 |
| 2016 | Chair and co-organizer: Rethinking Gender Normativity, Sexuality, and Morality through Non-Biomedical Epistemologies. The Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Minneapolis, November 16–20 |
| 2016 | Organizer: “Successful Grant Writing” Workshop for Social Science Researchers. At the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, August 18 |
| 2019 | “Alternative Health Commodities and the Discourse of Trust in India.” At the AAA 2019, Vancouver. |
| 2018 | “Pursuing Health and Belonging through Biomoral Consumption: A Case of the Ayurvedic Industry in Contemporary India.” At the workshop TransAsian Connections. Theme: States of Fortification: Connecting Asia through Technologies of Food and Health, organized by SSRC. December 2018, Hanoi |
| 2018 | “Organic or Ayurvedic? Entangled Ideologies of Health, Class, and Cultural Identity in Contemporary India.” At the Workshop: Transecting Healthy and Sustainable Food in the Asia-Pacific, Yale-NUS Singapore, July 30-August 2 |
| 2017 | Doctors and “Medical Houses:” Family-based Medical Pluralism in Contemporary India. The 46th Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin Madison, Oct 28 |
| 2017 | Gender in Policy and Design for Sustainable and Resilient Communities. At the joint meeting of The International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE) and the International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology (ISSST), Chicago, IL, USA, June 25-29 |
| 2017 | Community, Gender, and Life Course: Sustainability for Whom? At the Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Santa Fe, March 28–April 1 |
| 2016 | Yoga, Herbs, and ‘Homosexuality Cures’: Approaching Sexual and Gender Difference in Indian Medicine, at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Minnesota, USA, November 16–20. |
| 2016 | Therapeutic Plurality, Ayurvedic Hegemony and the Cultural Politics of Nationalism in North India, at the workshop Indian medicine: Between state and village, organized by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden, the Netherlands, June 23–24 |
| 2015 | Rhetoric, Rituals, and the Biopolitics of a ‘Homegrown’ Medicine in India. American Anthropological Association Meeting, Denver, USA, November 18–22 |
| 2015 | “Muslim” Unani and “Global” Ayurveda: Convergence and Disparity of Two Medical Traditions in India. At The Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies, Pittsburgh, USA, October 9–11 |
| 2015 | Medicinal Plants Discourse: Seeking and Selling Health in the Indian Himalayas. At 7th Annual Anthropology Postgraduate Student Forum, “Impacting the World: Emerging Voices of Asian Anthropology”, Chinese University of Hong Kong, January 23–24 |
| 2013 | Medical Ideologies and Negotiated Treatment in the Context of Structured Medical Pluralism in North India. At Joint International Conference by EASA Medical Anthropology Network, AAA Society for Medical Anthropology, and Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain, June 12–14 |
| 2013 | Research on Medical Pluralism in the 21st century, or Ubiquitous Questions of Ethics, Methods, and Funding. At the 4th Annual Meeting, Medical Anthropology Young Scholars, Spain, June 10–11 |
| 2007 | Ethnosocial Environment in Bulava village, Khabarovsky district. At the Russian Student Conference, RSUH, Moscow, Russia, December |
| 2007 | Bulgarian Diaspora in Ukraine. At the Congress of Young Scholars, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, November |
| 2006 | Co-presenter (with Valentina Chubarova) Ethnic Stereotypes and Inter-Ethnical Relations in Krinichnoe village, Ukraine. At the Russian-Ukrainian Student Conference, RSUH, Moscow, Russia |