A.K. Kakati, Dr
Research interests
I am a lecturer at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society
at the University of Groningen. I teach courses related to
anthropology, history and historical anthropology.
I am a doctorate in International History and (with Minor in
Anthropology and Sociology), from the Graduate Institute of
International and Development Studies, Geneva (IHEID). My PhD
thesis was titled Living on the Edge: How encounters with global
war (WWII) re-made the Indo-Burma frontiers into bordered-worlds.
My postdoctoral projects studied the historical production of
"remoteness" at intellectual, spatial, and socio-cultural levels
and how these shaped long-term governance and sovereignty contests
in the India-Myanmar (Burma) border-regions.
My previous work was based on an ethnographic project, Eating
Ethnic Enclaves, which studied cultural encounters in liminal
eating spaces due to migrations from the Eastern Himalayan Region.
The research was on the emergence of ethnic cuisine, restaurant and
labor shaping cultural identity politics, social conflicts and
relations arising from minority community migrations from
borderland conflict zones within India. I am co-editing a volume
that republishes a rare manuscript by Banikanta Kakati titled,
Vishnuite Myths and Legends, in an attempt to situate this work in
the contemporary political and intellectual historical milieu of
India and its Northeast.
I am a former Fellowship holder and am currently still affiliated
as a researcher at the International Institute for Asian Studies
(IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands. I had a research grant from the
the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for doing research at
the University of Amsterdam and the School of Oriental and African
Studies at London University, followed by a brief stint at the FMSH
in Paris.
I previously visited as a fellow at Princeton University and the
Institute of Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, Oxford
University-Europaem program. I am currently engaged with projects
with the Highland Institute, Nagaland. Aditya hails from Assam in
India, and completed his undergraduate studies in History from St
Stephen’s College, New Delhi and a MA in International
History from Geneva.