ORCID

https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0002-8182-1876

Date of Award

Summer 2026

Language

English

Embargo Period

7-22-2028

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Anthropology

Program

Anthropology

First Advisor

Walter Little

Committee Members

Elise Andaya, Jessica Namakkal

Keywords

Civilizational, minor, post/colonial, heritage, assemblage

Subject Categories

Social and Cultural Anthropology

Abstract

What does heritage do to bodies, human and non/more than human and how do these various bodies come together to produce and be produced by, heritage? This dissertation takes up these simultaneous questions and makes them its object of inquiry. Set within India’s current Hindu nationalist/Hindutva regime, this dissertation engages with the politics of heritage within an ethnonationalist state project: a civilizational project that makes heritage its most productive domain, inseparable from questions of the body within the state and invariably of the body of the nation itself. In an ethnographic study in Puducherry, this dissertation engages in the questions of heritage within the current regime in India not as a separate domain, with the distinctions between material and cultural heritage, but as the lens through which a civilizational state project is mobilized. Puducherry (or Pondicherry/ Pondichéry) was under French colonial occupation, merged with India, de jure in 1962. The specific position as “French India” makes it not only a minor colonial space vis-à-vis the dominant or major colonizer, the British, but also a productive post/colonial space wherein the linear script of colonialization, decolonization and civilizationism does not neatly apply. In the recent past, Puducherry has emerged as one of the most popular tourist destinations in India, drawing domestic and diasporic Indian tourists, based on the restaging of its colonial heritage. This dissertation engages how the colonial is creatively and strategically adopted, silenced and mobilized to further an idea of civilizational heritage.

I develop the concept of heritorialization to understand how heritage is mobilized under far-right civilizational state projects in assembling and reassembling bodies, producing differential belonging as its irreducible political effect. I develop this through a material-discursive-affective approach to heritage and through the productive intersection of the colonial/postcolonial apparatus and the civilizational assemblage. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage, critical heritage and critical tourism studies, and deploying a critical caste lens, this dissertation delves into and moves within the civilizational state. The “civilizational state” is doubly operative here. It marks, first, a nation-state that is civilizational, wherein every question is reducible to heritage. It underscores and analyzes, second, the “state of civilization” or “civilizational heritage” that bodies are brought into, and that they continually reproduce, that is always totalizing but never total.

Comments

N/A

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This work is licensed under the University at Albany Standard Author Agreement.

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Available for download on Saturday, July 22, 2028

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