Abhimanyu Pandey, M.A.

Abhimanyu Pandey, M.A., MPhil (Cantab)

Position

• Doctoral Student

Contact information

Research foci

Trans-Himalayas, borderlands, anthropology of connectivity and roads, cultural ecosystem services, institutions and governance, tradition and modernity in the Himalayas

Short Biography

Abhimanyu Pandey, an Indian national, is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the South Asia Institute. The title of his research project is ‘Materialities of Connectivity: an Anthropology of Roads, Development Narratives, and Everyday Lives in Himalayan Borderlands’. Prior to commencing his doctoral studies, he worked as a social scientist at the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu, Nepal, from 2014 till 2017. He holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. He has been the recipient of an EU grant for short term ethnographic research in Copenhagen (2011); a Commonwealth Cambridge Shared Scholarship (2012-2013); a Charles Wallace short-term research fellowship (2015), a Sigrid Rausing grant from the Department of Anthropology, University of Cambridge (2016), and a DAAD doctoral grant (2017 onwards). He has conducted anthropological and qualitative research in Bhutan, China, Denmark, India, and Nepal.

Title of PhD:

Materialities of ‘Connectivity’: an Anthropology of Roads, Development Narratives, and Everyday Lives in the Himalayan borderlands

Short description

This project researches the material, affective, and political effects of road connectivity on everyday life, livelihoods, and identity in a Trans-Himalayan borderland. The field site for this project is the Spiti valley, a high-altitude valley with cold-desert type vegetation that borders the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China to its east.