Ananta Kumar Giri
Associate Professor
Madras Institute of Development Studies
79, Second Main Road, Gandhinagar,
Adyar, Chennai - 600 020
Tamil Nadu, INDIA.

E-mail: [email protected]
           a[email protected]

About Ananta K Giri

Ananta Kumar Giri is currently on the faculty of  the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. Giri had his education at Ravenshaw College, Orissa (B.A., 1984); Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi (MA in Sociology, 1986); and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA (PhD, Anthropology, 1994). Prior to joining the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Gin had taught and done research at National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies, New Delhi; Jamia Millia Islarnia, New Delhi; G.B. Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Giri has an abiding interest in transformative social action, alternative movements of ideas, socio-cultural movements and spiritual mobilizations. The origin of this interest of his goes back to his study of the Chipko movement in the Himalayas in the mid-1980s. This interest also draws on his earlier studies on the transnational socio-religious movement of Habitat for Humanity (the subject of his PhD thesis and the subsequent publication, Building in the Margins of Shacks: The Vision and Projects of Habitat for Humanity, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 2002) and the People's Science Movement of India (the subject of his essay, "The Portrait of a Discursive Formation: Science as Social Activism in Contemporary India,' which forms part of Global Transformations: Postmodernity and Beyond (Jaipur & Delhi: Rawat Publications, 1998). Giri has subsequently carried on fieldwork on the vision and project of  the self-study movement of Swadhyaya  in India and England, and is currently finalizing a book on it provisionally entitled,  Self-Development and Social Transformations? The Vision and Experiments of the Socio-Spiritual Mobilization of Swadhyaya.  Giri has also been recently interested in the vision and experiments of integral education, having carried out preliminary fieldwork on it in Orissa.  This has made him interested in the wider issue of child-centered education. Giri has also been looking at the work of the Danish folk high school movement and is currently translating the biography of Kristen Kold, the pioneer of Danish folk high school, from Oriya to English.  Through his study of Swadhyaya and integral education, he has sought to bring the neglected theme of self-development to development studies.  Giri�s most recent work, Reflections and Mobilizations: Dialogues with Movements and Voluntary Organizations (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004), carries this critical interrogation of the discourse and practice of development forward by pleading for transformative dialogues between scholars and activists.    

Giri's work with social movements has made him interested in the issue of social criticism and cultural creativity, He co-ordinated an international seminar on "Social Criticism, Cultural Creativity and the Contemporary Dialectics of Transformations" in December 1996 at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. His opening address at the seminar has been published in Dialectical Anthropology (September 1998) and a volume from the seminar entitled, Rethinking Social Transformation: Social Criticism and Cultural Creativity at the Turn of the Millennium has come out from Rawat Publications in 2001.

Giri also continues his interest in rethinking theories and methods. He co-ordinated a national seminar on "Creative Social Research: Rethinking Theories and Methods" at University of Kerala in September 1997. His paper there, "Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries: Creative Experiments and the Critiques of Modernity," has been published in Critique of Anthropology (December, 1998). A volume emerging from the seminar, Creative Social Research: Rethinking Theories and Methods, has come out simultaneously from Lexington Books, USA and Sage Publications, New Delhi . In terms of rethinking theories, Giri has a special interest now in rethinking power. His recent effort has been to show the limitation of a power-model of the human condition (where power means domination) and to explore alternative modes of being, becoming and relationships. His current interest in ethnography of socio-spiritual movements embodies this concern. Such alternative possibilities in the vision and dynamics of power were further explored in a seminar he recently co-ordinated at Kottayam in April 1999 on "The Modem Prince and the Modem Sage: Transforming Power and Freedom." Giri is now editing a book on this theme with contributions from scholars such S.N. Eisenstadt, Fred Dallmayr, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Kanchana Mahadevan and Frank R. Ankersmit. A further emerging area of interest of him in this regard is opening social theory to  transcivilizational dialogues and planetary conversations. An initial attempt in this regard, "Knowledge and Human Liberation: Jurgen Habennas, Sri Aurobindo and Beyond," has come out in European Journal of Social Theory 7 (1), January 2004. Giri is also currently working with Professors Sang-Jin Han of Seoul National University and John Clammer of Sophia University , Tokyo , in initiating an Asian Forum for Social Theory.  He co-convened a session on �Critical Social Theory and Asian Dialogues� at the World Congress of Sociology in Beijing in July 2004 and is currently editing a volume on this. In this spirit of exploring new contours of social theory as planetary conversations, he also co-convened a session on �Philosophy and Anthropology: Border-Crossing and Transformations� at the 8^th Bi-Annual Conference of European Association of Social Anthropologists at Vienna, Spetember 2004. He is also co-organizing a session on �Beyond Sociology� at the forthcoming World Congress of Sociology at Stockholm in July 2006.   

Values and ethics have been another interest of Giri. He has just published Conversations and Transformations: Towards a New Ethics of Self and Society (Lanham, USA: Lexington Books, 2002).  While being at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 1993-94, he had carried out an ethnographic study on the ethical discourse of managers and management educators. His book, Values, Ethics and Business: Challenges for Education and Management (Jaipur & New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 1998) grows out of this. In recent years, he has extended this interest of his into theoretical domains having carried out a dialogue with Jurgen Haberrnas and Emmanuel Levinas. His papers, "Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action: From Discourse Ethics to Spiritual Transformations" (History of the Human Sciences, Aug. 1998) and "The Calling of an Ethics of Servanthood" (Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1998) carry out this dialogue.  He has also been interested in the calling of development ethics and has recently co-edited with Philip Quarles van Ufford of Free University, Amsterdam, A Moral Critique of Development: In Search of Global Responsibility (London: Routledge, 2003). This book has also been translated into Bhasa Indonesia and formed the background for an international conference on "Development as Global Responsibility" that Giri co-organized at the Research Institute Percik in Salatiga , Indonesia in December 2003.  Giri has also co-edited a book on religion, The Development of Religion / Religion of Development, taking the issues of development ethics to new depth and directions.

In his just published book, Reflections and Mobilizations: Dialogues with Movements and Voluntary Organizations, Giri explores pathways of being scholar-activists in our contemporary times. Giri's recent work on global responsibility has taken him in both ethnographic and philosophical directions, pleading for a greater interpenetration between philosophy and anthropology. He has been carrying out fieldwork on global justice movements such as Attac (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens) in Europe which fight for the implementation of Tobin Tax on international transactions. He is also looking at radical social movements in contemporary Brazil and working with Professor Leonardo Avritzer of Federal University of Mine Gerais, Belo Horizonte, in an edited volume on �Social Movements and Democratic Transformations in India and Brazil.� In his work on global responsibility Giri has been simultaneously interested in the issues of global justice and transcivilizational dialogue. His interest in practical spirituality has also brought him face to face with the challenge of inter-religious dialogue or lack thereof, and he has been studying the recent upsurge of Hindu-Christian conflicts in India in a comparative global perspective.

Giri writes in both Oriya and English. He has published six books in Oriya such as Patha Prantara Nrutattwa (Anthrpology of Street Corner), Mu Jadi Dhumaketu Hoithanti (If 1 were a Comet), and Koinonia Diary. His essays on criticism, Sameekhya, Parampara 0 Purdorusti (Criticism: Tradition and the Calling of Future) has formed part of the postgraduate syllabus in the Department of Oriya, Sambaipur University , Orissa , India . His two most recent books in Oriya are Srasta, Sastra o Sanskruti[The Author, Text and Culture] and Ba Galara Tila Chihna [A Dot in the Right Cheek] both published by Pathika Prakashani, Bhubaneswar in 2004.Giri has published widely in several national and international journals such as Futures, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Sociological Bulletin, The Eastern Anthropologist, Economic and Politeal Weekly, Journal of Human Values, History of the Human Sciences, Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, Dialectical Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology and European Journal of Social Theory. He has also traveled widely and has lectured in different universities and institutes in India , Europe , North America , South America , and East Asia such as University of Cambridge ; MSH, Paris; University of Barcelona ; The University of Edinburgh; University of Notre Dame; York University , Toronto; Seoul National University ; and Sophia University , Tokyo . Giri was a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at International Social Science Institute, University of Edinburgh in 1999 and a visiting scholar at International Institute of Asian Studies, Amsterdam in 2001-2002.  In 2002 he was a visiting fellow at the Jacob Blaustein Institute of Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev , Israel and a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at the Appalachian Center, University of Kentucky . In 2003 Giri was a visiting scholar with Korea Foundation, Seoul and at the Department of Education, Lund University , Sweden .