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About
At the core of my scholarly and artistic practice is an inquiry into what sustains us in the absence of clarity.
The main body of my scholarly work explores the ethical lives of individuals living with what psychiatry terms psychosis and schizophrenia in India. My book manuscript, Ethics at the Rupture, rethinks madness not as an incommensurable state of being. Instead, it reveals madness as a fractured yet enduring site of ethical and philosophical life - a persistent orientation toward human and more-than-human others and a search for a meaningful existence.
My emerging research turns to heroin addiction as it intersects with race and caste across the Indian Ocean. Across these projects, I am interested in forms of sustenance and relational endurance amid multiple states and temporalities: from rupture and precarity to boredom and stuckness.
As an artist, I explore related themes through a variety of mediums, including film, performance, text, and choreography. I am interested in what embodiment, as well as iconic and imagistic forms of representation, make available to us. I hope that the arts, in all their complexity and fraughtness, can still open new ways of relating to one another and attuning to the worlds we inhabit and seek to make otherwise.
You can find my work here: about.me/anjanabala
PhD in Medical Anthropology - UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco
MSc in Medical Anthropology - University College London
BA in Human Biology - Stanford University
Expertise
India, psychological anthropology, art, embodiment, ecology, religion, trauma