Ashawari Chaudhuri

Overview

I am an anthropologist and an STS scholar whose research focuses on the environment, agriculture, and health. My historically grounded ethnography, The Kernel of Doubt explores how relations among agriculture, environment, and labor in India are reshaped by agricultural biotechnology, itself born from complex interactions of the state, capital, and science. Based on fieldwork with cotton farmers, breeders in seed companies, bureaucrats, and regulators, along with archival research, the book tells the story of a critical moment in agriculture that is not just a sequel to the history of science and commodification but a blueprint for the future of agriculture in a region frayed by extreme heat and climate change. It brings critical agrarian studies, environmental anthropology, and science, technology, and society (STS) into conversations with each other.

My current project explores the relation between environmental heat and the body since the Mughal period until the present in South Asia. The project traces how knowledge disciplines like architecture and medicine inquired about environmental heat and deployed technologies to mitigate it, and how those practices transformed concepts of the body and health. Not only did hierarchies of race, gender, caste, or class lead to divergent experiences of heat by people, difference became deterministic in writings about the body, especially during the colonial period. I show that the paradox of heat being ubiquitous yet invisible in places like South Asia that makes these places more precarious. I connect heat with health to situate the issue in a geographical and an analytical location that is beyond temperate lands where it is often studied as a catastrophe.

I have lived in India, Singapore, and the U.S. I know Bengali, Hindi, English, and I have been learning Mughal Persian for the past few years. My research and teaching are infused with my own senses of self, belonging, and identity. When I am not teaching or doing research, I am interested in healing plants, stars, and cultural interpretations of dreams.