I’m a doctoral fellow at the Committee for Globalisation and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center. My thesis is a constitutional ethnography that focuses on the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It discusses the relationship between law, identity, and daily life in postcolonial India with a particular emphasis on political belonging, customary law, criminal jurisprudence, and the conceptual history of the “tribe” within and beyond anthropology. 

I began my fieldwork in February 2020, and spent the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic living and working in Shillong, a city in northeastern India. My research was only possible because of the support of the Social Science Research Council. I’m grateful to them for their generosity and to my host family for their camaraderie through all the lockdowns, curfews, confusions, and delays of those grim years. I had the rare privilege of spending the worst of the pandemic (so far) in the field, and the warmth and laughter we shared helped me feel at home.

Samples of my published writing can be found on the Essays page, and you can subscribe to my newsletter at tinyletter/chaosbogey.

Contact chaosbogey@gmail.com or @chaosbogey on Twitter.

Header image by Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, 1678.