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Man with a white beard and short hair smiling, wearing a green jacket with a glass structure in the background.

Harish Naraindas

Visiting Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Ashoka University

Ph.D. University of Delhi

Harish Naraindas recently retired as a professor of sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is currently an honorary professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Melbourne, and at Shiv Nadar University (SNIoE), NCR-Delhi. He was adjunct faculty at the University of Iowa (2004-19); DAAD visiting professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Heidelberg (2017); joint-appointments professor of the Cluster of Excellence, University of Heidelberg (2008-12); and visiting professor at the department of sociology, University of Freiburg (2009).

He works on the history and sociology of science and medicine and has published on a range of topics, including the histories of tropical medicine and smallpox from the 18th to the 20th century, the creolisation of contemporary Ayurveda, on medical tourism and spa medicine in Germany, on pregnancy and childbirth within the context of competing medical epistemes, a critique of global mental health through a hospital ethnography of German psychosomatic medicine, on the sacramental nature of anthropological explanations of the non-human, and on a general theory of medicine and alternative medicine worldwide, that at once extends and interrogates the anthropological holy trinity of magic, religion, and science.

He is currently working on epigenetics, personalised medicine and digital twins, and on perinatal loss and bereavement in the Anglo-European world. Among his publications are a co-edited special issue of Anthropology and Medicine called ‘The fragile medical: the slippery terrain between medicine, anthropology, and Societies’ (2017), and two co-edited books: ‘Healing holidays: itinerant patients, therapeutic locales, and the quest for health’ (London: Routledge, 2015), and ‘Asymmetrical conversations: contestations, circumventions, and the blurring of therapeutic boundaries’ (New York: Berghahn, 2014)

  • 2023: “Is Medical Tourism Transcultural Hypogamy?” Studies in History, 39 (1), 109-124 https://doi.org/10.1177/02576430231184534
  • 2023 “Privileging the Body: The Bio-materialisation of Medicine and the Asymmetrical Production of Pluralism”. In Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World 1600‐2000: Medicine, Material Culture and Trade. Edited by Gerritsen, Anne and Burton Cleetus, London: Bloomsbury Press. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/histories-of-health-and-materiality-in-the-indian-ocean-world-9781350195882/
  • 2021: “Psychedelic Therapy: Diplomatic Re-compositions of Life/Non-life, the Living and the Dead”. In The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia. Edited by Sax, William and Claudia Lang, 165-209. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9789048550135.006
  • 2020: “Past and Present. Can India beat Corona the way it beat Smallpox. The India Forum. 1 May. https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/past-and-present
  • 2017: “Of sacraments, sacramentals and anthropology: is anthropological explanation sacramental?” Anthropology & Medicine, 24, 3: 276-300. https://doi.org/10.1080/13648470.2017.1389167
Study at Ashoka

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