This episode’s guest, Vaibhav Saria, is the author of Hijras, Lovers, Brother: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India (published in 2021), an impressively rich and nuanced ethnographic account of the everyday lives of hijras- often translated as one of India’s “trans” populations, how they subvert, play with and preserve and care for normative arrangements.

Vaibhav Saria is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Holding a PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, Vaibhav’s research and teaching span a wide array of topics, including global health and medical anthropology; gender, sexuality, and kinship; panics, pandemics, and poverty; questions of ethics, violence, law and nationalism.

Host:

George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.  

Production:  

Ethnographic Imagination Basel:  

Zainabu Jallo, Ann Karimi Kern (Ethnologisches Seminar Universität Basel)  

in collaboration with the New Media Center