Arafaat A. Valiani

Assistant Professor of Sociology

BA Concordia University
MA LSE/SOAS
PhD Columbia University

MAJOR INTERESTS

Militant Publics in India: Physical Culture and Violence in the Making of a Modern Polity (Palgrave, in press). Click here to view a webcast of Prof. Valiani giving Kluge Lecture, Library of Congress (Washington D.C.), which draws from this work. (RealPlayer is needed to view the webcast; download the player here.)
Infrastructures of Urban Commerce and Consumption in India and Pakistan. Current book project.
‘Physical Training and Techniques of Violence: Zones of Self-Mastery in the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Gujarat, India)’. Cultural Anthropology (Vol. 25, 2009). An interview of Prof. Valiani, as well as other supplementary material related to this article, can be accessed here, an Open Access site.
'Political Identity and Violence in India' (2009). Essay pertaining to the terrorist attacks which took place in Mumbai, India in 2008. This contribution was solicited by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and appears on the SSRC's blog, 'Off the Cuff: Mumbai Revisited' (a column within one of the SSRC's main blogs entitled 'The Immanent Frame: Secularism, religion and the public sphere').
‘Violence’ (2007). Essay on the scholarly genealogy of the concept. It appears in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
‘The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China’ by Erik Mueggler, 2001. Anthropologica, Volume 45, No. 1, 2003, pp. 450-453 (Review).
‘Peace Parades the City?’, posted on www.indymedia.org in 2002.