Radhika Govindrajan is a sociocultural anthropologist who works across the fields of environmental and agrarian studies, political and legal anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, the anthropology of religion, and South Asian Studies. At its broadest, her research is motivated by a longstanding commitment to exploring the relational making and unfolding of everyday political, ethical, religious, and sexual subjectivities in rural social worlds co-created through human and nonhuman efforts. She is interested in how historical and emergent formations of animality, caste, sexuality, religion, nationalism, law, bureaucracy, and capitalism shape the conditions of possibility for being and (un)becoming subjects who index the “rural”. This interest is grounded in South Asia, specifically the Indian Himalaya (Uttarakhand), where she has conducted archival and ethnographic research for over fifteen years.
Her first monograph, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. A trade edition with the title Animal Intimacies: Beastly Love in the Himalayas was published by Penguin Viking India in 2019. Animal Intimacies is a feminist ethnography of everyday forms of interspecies relatedness – forged through relations of labor, care, violence, hostility, sexual desire, and indifference – between human and nonhuman animals. Animal Intimacies was recognized with several awards, including the 2019 Gregory Bateson Prize and the 2018 Edward Cameron Dimock Prize in the Indian Humanities. The Indian edition received a Longlist mention for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize.
She is currently completing a manuscript tentatively titled The Village is a Scandal: Sexual Politics and the Making of the Rural in Himalayan India. Drawing on four years of immersive ethnographic research conducted over a decade in mountain villages located in Uttarakhand, it argues that the fraught question of the village in contemporary India is fundamentally intertwined with what Gayle Rubin calls the “political economy of sex”, and demands feminist analysis.
Govindrajan has published articles on these issues in several journals, including American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Comparative Study of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Institute of Indian Studies.
