R. S. Khare (born 1936 in Lakhimpur Kheri District, Uttar Pradesh, India) is a socio-cultural anthropologist and a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, U.S. He is known for studying "from within/without" India's changing society, religions, food systems, and political cultures, and for following the trajectories of contemporary Indian traditional and modern cultural discourses. His anthropology has endeavored to widen reasoned bridges across the India-West cultural, religious-philosophical, and literary distinctions and differences.
Career
He obtained his M.A. (1957) and Ph.D. (1962) in socio-cultural anthropology from Lucknow University, India. His doctoral field research (1958–61) concerned the relationships domestic ritual purity-pollution practices had with the health and sanitation issues in a low-caste village near Lucknow. He simultaneously field studied how Lucknow's orthodox Kanyakubja Brahmins modernized. During his postdoctoral fellowship (1963–64) at the University of Chicago, while analyzing his researches, he was exposed to the studies of McKim Marriott and Milton Singer at Chicago, while already familiar with Louis Dumont's writings on the Indian caste system and civilization. Khare spent 1972 doing additional fieldwork in Rae Bareli (Uttar Pradesh), explicating the value-practice structures of Indian food, kinship, and ritual systems. The results were written up during a visiting fellowship (1974-75) at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, at Clifford Geertz's initiative. Khare's second research phase (1978-1995) included a series of field research trips for studying, first, urban Indian Dalit (the erstwhile Untouchable) communities and their local leaders and intellectuals; second, issues in anthropology of Indian food systems and food ideologies; and, third, aspects in the intellectual history of anthropology in—and on—India (including the contributions of M. N. Srinivas). Khare's third research phase (1996-2006) involved collaboration with a few prominent north Indian Dalit writers, thinkers, and political leaders in Lucknow, Kanpur and New Delhi, while also developing cultural critiques of the sharpening Indian caste, class, and gender inequalities, religious nationalism, and subaltern identity politics in India. The latest phase (2006-present) has concerned the studies of and issues in Indian modernity amid social diversity; anthropology of globalizing South Asian foods; and the post Cold War reshaping of India-Europe/West cultural dialectics.For an overview, see "Anthropology, India and the Academic Self: A Disciplinary Journey between Two Cultures over Four Decades," India Review, Vol. 7, no. 4, 2008.
Khare established and then chaired anthropology (1957-63) at the Kanya-Kubja College (now Jai Narayan College) in Lucknow. After Chicago, he spent a year (1964-65) in the Anthropology Department at Lucknow University, and moved on to the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay (1966-71) in the U.S. He chaired its newly created multidisciplinary "Modernization Concentration." In 1971, he joined University of Virginia as professor of anthropology just as anthropology separated as a department from the joint sociology-anthropology unit. At Virginia, he founded and led (1976-1992) an interdisciplinary faculty scholarly activities committee, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Studies and its director, Dean W. Dexter Whitehead, a physicist scholar-administrator. Concurrently, he chaired an International Commission on the Anthropology of Food. During 1990–91, Khare was a fellow of the university's Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change. He later became Interim Chair (2000–01) of the Department of Anthropology. In May 2004, he gave the XI D.N. Majumdar Memorial Lecture at his alma mater, Lucknow University (see principal publications). He has chaired the Center on Critical Human Survival Issues from Fall 1998 to December, 2018.
The major universities and research institutions where Khare has visited as a visiting faculty or fellow include: University of Chicago (1970); Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla, India (1971); École des Hautes Études en sciences sociales, Paris (Fall 1972); the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (fellow, 1974–75); Wolfson College and the Institute of Socio-Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University, U.K. (elected visiting fellow, winter and spring 1979–80, and again in May–June 1990); and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany (visiting fellow, 1996–97).
Contributions Khare intensively studied for two decades contemporary India's social "top" (i.e., Kanyakubja Brahmins and Upper Castes) and the "bottom" (Dalits). His early studies explicated how the changing caste/class hierarchies impacted orthodox Hindu hearth and family, and kinship and community.The Changing Brahmans: Associations and Elites among the Kanya-Kubjas of North India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1970. These led to showing how ideologically deeply rooted and distinct were the conceptions of Indic personhood, agency, social relations, food thoughts, social-ritual practices, and the associated cosmological semiotics.The Hindu Hearth and Home Delhi: Vikas Publications, 1976a; and Culture and Reality: Essays on the Hindu System of Managing Foods (Delhi, 1976a, Shimla, 1976b); edited with M. S. A. Rao: Food, Society and Culture; (Durham, NC, 1986); and Ed.: The Eternal Food (New York, 1992). But politically to Dalits, this privileged upper-caste Indian worldview had long festered with glairing moral blindness and socioeconomic inequalities and injustices, instigating twentieth century Dalits to demand their rightful moral-social, material and political rights. To do so was also to re-forge assertively their new identity, ideology, and pragmatic modern political activism.The Untouchable as himself: Ideology, Identity and Pragmatism among the Lucknow Chamars (Cambridge University Press, 1984) For Khare, studying Dalits also meant, inter alia, critically reevaluating approaches of Louis Dumont and McKim Marriott to Indian caste society and civilization. Khare's comparative critique employed the multi-stringed approach inherent in Indian traditional modern thought ways, agencies and actions. Dumont's mutually exclusive and "opposed" India-West ideological structures, by contrast, had precluded, for example, any and all the different Indic constructions of individual self, personhood and agency. Dumont had hence long attracted criticisms.Ed.: Caste, Hierarchy and Individualism: Indian Critiques of Louis Dumont's Contributions (Oxford Univ. Press, Delhi: 2006, 2009). Similarly, Marriott's rigorous attempts to create a comprehensive parsimonious transactional model for "the Hindu world" also excluded the crucial moral-spiritual self-locations (e.g. of reformist devotional saints) and their attendant intentional practical-political messages and agencies. For Marriott, all that was crucially Hindu had to be foundationally transactional.Marriott, McKim (Ed.) India Through Hindu Categories (Sage Publications, Delhi: 1990).
Khare's 1984 study outlined an alternative Indic model of the individual based on his work on Dalits and their thinkers.Khare, R. S. The Untouchable as himself… It showed how Dalit ascetics (among other saints) had long identified an activist spiritual-moral self to launch potent moral-social-political critiques of the upper-caste world and its biased and truncated worldview. Arjun Appadurai had soon offered, reviewing similar newer research initiatives, a critical historical-cultural evaluation of Dumont's views on India.Appadurai, Arjun, "Is Homo Hierarchicus?" American Ethnologist, Vol 13, No. 4,1986. Khare turned to explicate different reasoning platforms that the Indic/Hindu/Indian "cultural logic" followed in life, tracing the roles of intentions in Hindu reasoning patterns, and of social inequalities and conflicts in Indian traditional modern life quandaries."The Seen and the Unseen: Hindu distinctions, experiences, and cultural reasoning," Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1993. Also, Khare As thus both esoteric and exoteric India struggled, if mostly messily and imperfectly, amid the challenged ideals, norms and social privileges, then a suitably readapted sociology-anthropology was also sought (e.g., as Srinivas's studies showed). Both strands had critically magnified during the nineties India.Cultural Diversity and Social Discontent: Anthropological Studies on Contemporary India (Sage, Delhi: 1998) The Islamic moral-social-legal issues in Muslim life were no less affected, requiring, as Khare's anthology underscored, closer studies of the Islamic sectarian and inter-sectarian positions, and of vexing societal and moral-legal-medical issues, whether it was in India or elsewhere.Ed.:Perspectives on Islamic Law, Justice and Society(Lanham, MD, New York: 1999). Latest, globalizing India is flooded with newer historical-cultural, literary and multi-media representations, all clamoring to frame this new century India vis-à-vis, mainly, Western Europe and America.Edited with Ralph Cohen: "India and the West—A Symposium," New Literary History, Vol. 40, no. 2 (Spring 2009). Posing this change, D. Shyam Babu, a Dalit researcher-journalist, in collaboration with Khare, assembled a cluster of autobiographic narratives to show how, in actual life, one still encountered caste inequalities in India.Edited with D. Shyam Babu: Caste in Life: Experiencing Inequalities. Pearson, Delhi: 2011.
Among Khare's professional contributions, two broad areas stand out, one relating to the interdisciplinary initiatives and organizations developed mostly at or from University of Virginia, and the other in starting and establishing the International Commission on Anthropology of Food.
Interdisciplinary studies at University of Virginia From 1976 to 1992, Khare led a wide-ranging interdisciplinary faculty committee for scholarly collaboration at the University of Virginia. The Committee on the Comparative Study of Society and Culture was sponsored by the then Center for Advanced Studies. Composed of distinguished university faculty members, the committee engaged wide-ranging topics by inviting scholars, holding conferences, lecture series, symposia, or single-day colloquia. Some scholars joined onto specific writing projects. The committee's work led to a series of publications (lasting until 1994), including a series of Working PapersFor example, some of the Committee's publications were : The six Working Papers (published from 1986 to 1994) had concerned widely different topics, ranging from "Critique of Modernity" (ed. Robert Langbaum), University of Virginia, 1986; "Issues in Compensatory Justice: The Bhopal Accident (ed. R. S. Khare), University of Virginia, 1987; and "Issues in Evolution, History and Progress (ed. Robert Scharlemann). Lanham (MD): University Press of America, 1990. Among the books are: Needham, Rodney Primordial Characters. Charlottesville (VA), University Press of Virginia, 1978; Khare, R. S. and David Little (eds.) Leadership: Interdisciplinary Reflections. Lanham (MD): University Press of Virginia, 1984; and Hartt, Julian N., Ray Hart and Robert Scharlemann The Critique of Modernity: Theological Reflections on Contemporary Culture. Charlottesville (VA): University Press of Virginia, 1986.