Aparna Rao


Aparna Rao was a German anthropologist who performed studies on social groups in Afghanistan, France, and some regions of India.

Early life and family

Rao was born in New Delhi, India to Oxford–educated and parents who were political activists. Her parents showing her the socioeconomic conditions in India and a sense of "personal responsibility" and "social conscience" served as her prime inspiration for becoming an academic.
In 1980, she married Michael Casimir, who is a professor emeritus from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Cologne, Germany.

Education

Rao studied French literature, linguistics, cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, sociology, and ethnology at the University of Strasbourg. She also did her M.A. in anthropology from the University of Strasbourg in 1974, and later in 1980, completed her Ph.D. in ethnology from the Paris-Sorbonne University. She studied anthropogeography, ethnology, and Islamic studies during her doctorate studies.
She spoke the Bengali, English, Farsi, French, German, Hindi, Romanes, and Urdu languages.

Career

Rao taught anthropology as an associate professor at the University of Cologne, and from 1993 to 1995, she was chair of the Department of Ethnology at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University, Germany.
From 1995 to 1998, she served as the co-chairperson of the Commission on Nomadic Peoples of the International Union of Ethnological and Anthropological Sciences, along with Michael Casimir. She was a member of the Société Asiatique, and had been on the board of directors of the Association of Gypsy Lore Studies, and was also the editor-in-chief of the Nomadic Peoples journal.

Research

Rao had done research on the peripatetic, pastoral and agro-pastoral communities in Afghanistan, France, Jammu, Kashmir, and western Rajasthan, and published books and research papers on "various aspects of social and economic organization" within these social groups, and developed interest in the stream of culture change, conflict studies, and environmental cognition. For a number of years, she executed ethnographic field research on a number of rural and semi-rural social groups in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and western India. Her research works also included the impact of the conflict in Kashmir on the environment and lives of people, and from 1991 to 1994, she did research on the ethnic, religious, and political conflicts in Jammu and Kashmir.
Between 1995 and 1997, she was invited as a visiting scholar by the Institute of Development Studies at Jaipur, and between 2003 and 2004, by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies at Delhi.
Before her death, she was scheduled to be the research director at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris from June 2006.

Reception

Rena C. Gropper of the Hunter College notes that Rao was one of the few anthropologists who had carried out research studies in the midst of groups who draw their basic livelihood from other cultural groups. Gropper suggested that there was incoherence in her work while assessing her contributions to The Other Nomads: Peripatetic Minorities in Cross–Cultural Perspective. Ann Grodzins Gold of Syracuse University saw Rao's research on the Bakarwals as a "densely packed examination". While reviewing Culture, Creation, and Procreation: Concepts of Kinship in South Asian Practice, a book that was co–authored by Rao in 2000, Gold pointed out that a large proportion of its content had been drawn from anthropological field studies concluded or initiated in the 1970s and early 1980s, though simultaneously noting that the authors substantially covered the "geographic and ethnographic contexts" of South Asia.
Vinay Kumar Srivastava, the director of the Anthropological Survey of India, positively reviewed Rao's co–authored book, Nomadism in South Asia, acknowledging the extensive ethnographic investigations done on nomadism by the authors. He further added, "...this is the first volume of its kind that brings together different writings, from different cultural contexts on nomads."
The term "peripatetic peoples", that was coined by her, has become a part of the academic terminologies.

Awards

Rao was given the Choice award for her book "Autonomy: Life Cycle, Gender, and Status among Himalayan Pastoralists".

Death

Rao died of cancer on 28 June 2005.

Works

Some of the books and research papers authored and co–authored by Rao are as follows:

Books

Select papers