Kriti Kapila

Kriti Kapila is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on the work of law in contemporary India. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled Domestic Modern: Law, Intimacy and Citizenship in North India. The book is an anthropological study of the place of law in everyday domestic life in colonial and contemporary India.

Her present research is concerned with the regimes of evidence around cultural difference in India in three distinct but interrelated contexts. This research examines the politics of recognition in India with a particular focus on the overlaps and disjuncture between official, popular and academic understandings of the category ‘tribe’ in contemporary India. It further compares two large-scale mapping exercises that have the culture-concept at their heart, currently underway in India: a) the biologicalised understanding of Indian society in the ongoing research on the historical DNA of Indian population groups, and b) the codification of group rights in tangible and intangible cultural heritage under the UNESCO Convention and the interface of national and transnational legal regimes.

Kriti studied at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and did her PhD at the London School of Economics. She subsequently held the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge and was also a Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge.