Ezra Rashkow

Ezra Rashkow is a scholar of modern South Asian history, environmental history, and the history of anthropology. Much of his work engages with the experiences of indigenous peoples in modernity, and global debates over the relationship between biological and cultural diversity. In particular, the concept of “endangerment” has become a unifying strand throughout his body of work to date. His research thus explores historical discourses and policies that project biological and cultural diversity as similarly endangered, and in need of similar or simultaneous forms of conservation. Working in western and central India, he collects oral histories of Bhil, Gond, Baiga, Kurku and other Adivasi communities facing conservation- and/or development-induced displacement. He then situates these oral histories in dialog with the colonial archive, anthropological accounts, and activist engagements with these communities’ histories.