Professor David Gellner
Professor David Gellner, FBA
Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology
Fellow of All Souls College
Anthropology of South Asia, East Asia, Buddhism, Hinduism, cities, ritual, politics, ethnicity, acti
David Gellner was Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography from 2009-2012 and again from 2016-2018. His doctoral research (1982-4) was on the Vajrayana Buddhism of the Newars and on Newar social organization, in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. He has carried out fieldwork in Nepal on many subsequent occasions, broadening his interests to include politics and ethnicity, healers, mediums, and popular approaches to misfortune, religious change, activism of all sorts, democratization, elections, borderlands, Dalits, and class formation.
Professor Gellner retired in September 2024. Therefore, he is not accepting any new DPhil students.
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David Gellner has carried out fieldwork in the Kathmandu Valley and elsewhere in Nepal on many subsequent occasions, broadening his interests to include politics and ethnicity, healers, mediums, and popular approaches to misfortune, borderlands, and cultural and religious change. In 1991 he did three months' exploratory fieldwork on Buddhist priests in Japan. For eight years he taught at Brunel University, west London, the first British university to introduce a Master's course in medical anthropology. For three years from 2002-5 he held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for research into the social history and practice of activism in Nepal (for the academic year 2003-4 he combined this with a Visiting Professorship at the Research Institute for Cultures and Languages of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies). Between 2002 and 2008 he was the University Lecturer in the Anthropology of South Asia, the position formerly held by M.N. Srinivas, Louis Dumont, David Pocock, Ravi Jain, and Nick (N.J.) Allen.
From 2004 to 2007 he was also involved in coordinating the MIDEA project on democratization in South Asia.
He gave his inaugural lecture as Professor of Social Anthropology on May 15th, 2009.
Professor Gellner has been the PI on a series of research projects: the AHRC-ESRC-funded Vernacular Religion (2009-2012), the ESRC-funded Caste, Class, and Culture: Changing Bahun and Dalit Identities in Nepal (2013-2017), and the British Academy-funded The Dalit Search for Dignity: State, Society, and Mobilization from Below in Far West Nepal (2019-2023).
He was a part of two other research projects, 'Democratic Cultures' (PI Lucia Michelutti, UCL) and 'Alchemists of the Revolution' (PI Craig Jeffrey, then Geography, Oxford, since 2015 Melbourne). Thanks to the former project, he started research in Gorakhpur and eastern Uttar Pradesh. A major output of the Democratic Cultures project was a co-authored paper on the political history of Gorakhpur and the background to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, 'Politics in Gorakhpur since the 1920s: The Making of a Safe "Hindu" Constituency'. Thanks to the latter project, he began research in Birganj and elsewhere in the Nepalese Tarai.
Watch a lecture that he gave at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen, on June 10, 2010, on 'Building Theravada Networks in Nepal and Beyond'.
Listen to a seminar on 'Can there be an anthropology of Hinduism?', given on 5 December 2014
Watch a video of a lecture, 'Lumley's Children? The Nepali Community in Britain', given as part of Oxford University's Alumni Weekend in September 2014.
For a lecture, 'Visions of Modernity: How Activists Restructured Nepali Society' given on 16/2/17 in Konstanz, Germany, as the keynote address at a conference on 'Activism, Anthropologically Speaking'.
Watch an interview with Dalit Lives Matter Nepal.
On 16 September 2020 he gave the RAI's Henry Myers Lecture on ‘The Spaces of Religion: A View from South Asia'.
He is the editor, with colleague Nayanika Mathur, of the Berghahn Books series, Methodology and History in Anthropology.
Four recent edited books are (1) on borderlands in Northern South Asia, (2) on Religion, Secularism, and Ethnicity in Contemporary Nepal, (3) on Nepali diaspora populations around the world, and (4) on research among Nepalis in the UK and Belgium. Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia is available for free open access download.