Anastasia is a social anthropologist trained at Boston University and at Oxford. She has conducted extensive ethnographic and historical research in northern India since 2002. She now teaches at the India Institute at King’s College London, having previously taught anthropology and South Asian studies at Bristol and Cambridge. Anastasia works on India’s vernacular norms of personhood and relatedness, and the ways in which these orient India’s democratic process, and especially local conceptions of political representation and responsibility. She is especially interested in how hierarchical values – idioms of kingship, patronage and divinity – shape Indian conceptions of political good, and the implications of this for comparative democratic theory. She has previously written on crime, policing and corruption in India, on secrecy and the public sphere, on ‘criminal tribes,’ patronage and democracy, hierarchy and egalitarianism, and on social theory and the history of anthropology at large. Anastasia was previously co-Investigator of a European Research Council & Economic and Social Research Council-funded project on South Asia's democratic cultures. She is editor of Patronage as politics in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and author of Nobody’s people: Hierarchy as hope in a society of thieves (Stanford University Press, 2020).
