Obituary for Aparna Rao (1950-2005)

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Aparna's last two books have just been published (Rao, Aparna. 2008. The Valley of Kashmir: The Making and Unmaking of a Composite Culture? and Rao, A. Bollig and Bock. 2007. The Practice of War--Production, Reproduction and Communication of Armed Violence. London: Berghahn.)--almost four years after her premature death. Both books had been her last big projects. The first book deals with the complex culture(s) of Kashmir and their contemporary development and the second book focuses on anthropological perspectives on new forms of violence. She worked on various contributions with a lot of energy, straightened the course of arguments and put language straight. It is her path-breaking energy, her academic astuteness and her immense talent for in-depth questioning of scientific arguments, which her colleagues will fondly remember. It was also her tactfulness mad modesty which made it easy for us to listen to her well-founded arguments. Aparna died on 28 June 2005 after being severely sick for about a year. Due to her premature death, international anthropology has lost an excellent, highly innovative and diverse researcher. Her departure will be particularly felt in the field of studies on nomadic populations. Together with her husband Michael Casimir, she chaired the Commission for Nomadic Peoples and edited the Journal for Nomadic Peoples for many years. Her ethnographic and theoretical publications on peripatetic populations, as well as her research on the nomadic Bakkarwal of Kashmir, are milestones in the research on mobile communities. Beyond this, Aparna published widely and influentially on conflict and violence in addition to social structure and gender issues, especially in the South Asian context. Aparna was born on 3 February 1950 in New Delhi as the third child of a historian and an Anglicist. Both her parents had studied at Oxford and both had been engaged in the political struggles of India during their time. Through her parents, Aparna was confronted with the grave socioeconomic problems of India and became acquainted with the role of academia in societal struggles. Although belonging to an elite family, social conscience and personal responsibility were core motivations for her later academic engagements. Aparna studied in Europe, as did her parents: French literature at the University of Strasbourg, where she completed her studies with a diploma in 1969, and later, cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistics and sociology at the same university. She completed her anthropological studies in Strasbourg with the M.A. thesis 'Les Sinte du pays rhenan. Essai d'une monographie d'un sous-groupe tsigane'. Throughout her academic life, Aparna ingeniously worked on diverse anthropological topics, although her interest in mobile populations stayed at the core of her academic explorations. In 1974, she began studies for her Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied anthropology, geography and Islamic studies. In the late 1970s she conducted about two years of fieldwork among peripatetic peoples in Afghanistan. There she studied the peripatetic Ghorbat, a mobile, endogamous minority community that offers various services to other communities. The Ghorbat are despised and of low status, and fieldwork with such a community demands a high degree of commitment and energy. Aparna's excellent Ph.D. work 'Les Ghorbat d'Afghanistan. Aspects economiques d'un groupe itinerant 'jat', supervised by the renowned academic Xavier de Planhol, was defended in 1980 and published in 1982. In subsequent years, Aparna combined her in-depth knowledge of the Ghorbat with her interest in comparative studies. She found that many of these endogamous minority communities around the world share similar features: they are spatially mobile, and do not produce food, but obtain their subsistence through exchanging services with dominant populations. More often than not they are also despised by the larger society. …