"Resistance to the Nepalese State: Why did it collapse so quickly?"

Speaker:

Dr. David N. Gellner , University Lecturer in the Anthropology of South Asia, Oxford University

Date&Time:

16:00-18:00, November 4 (Tue), 2003

Venue:

E207, East Building of CSEAS

David Gellner is University Lecturer in the Anthropology of South Asia at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and Fellow of Wolfson College. His doctoral research (1982-4) was on the traditional, Vajrayana Buddhism of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. He has carried out fieldwork in the Kathmandu Valley on many subsequent occasions, broadening his interests to include politics and ethnicity, healers, mediums, and popular approaches to misfortune, and religious change, in particular the history and effects of the newly introduced Theravada Buddhist movement. He has also done three months' exploratory fieldwork on Buddhist priests in Japan. For eight years he taught at Brunel University, west London, the first British university to introduce a Master's course on medical anthropology. From 2002-5 David Gellner is on leave, holding a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for research into the social history and practice of activism in Nepal.