Thomas Blom Hansen

About

Thomas Hansen is the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. He founded and directed Stanford’s Center for South Asia from 2010 to 2017. Hansen is an anthropologist specializing in political life, ethno-religious identities, violence, and urban life in South Asia and Southern Africa. His research interests encompass political theory, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and contemporary urbanism. His early fieldwork was conducted during the early 1990s amidst conflicts between Hindu militants and Muslims, which led to the publication of two books: 'The Saffron Wave. Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India' (Princeton 1999), exploring Hindu nationalism within India's democratic context, and 'Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay' (Princeton 2001), examining historical processes and identity formations behind socioreligious conflicts. In the early 2000s, Hansen studied religious revival, racial conflict, and transformations of domestic and intimate life in a Durban township, resulting in the book 'Melancholia of Freedom. Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa' (Princeton University Press, 2012). Beyond ethnographic work, Hansen has pursued theoretical interests in the anthropology of the state, sovereignty, religion, violence, and urban life in the Global South. He is currently finishing a book on the global spread of notions of popular sovereignty and the rise of illiberal…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• History
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Ancient history
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial

  The AAG Review of Books · 2022 · 31 citations

  <b>Book Review Forum</b> on Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial /Somdeep Sen. Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press. x and171 pp. $25.95 paper (ISBN 978-1501752742); $65.55 cloth (ISBN 978-1501752735)

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: States of Imagination

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 25 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Sovereignty in a Minor Key

  Public Culture · 2021-01-01 · 23 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins a global account of modern sovereignty not from the heart of Western Europe but from the complex arrangements of “distributed sovereignty” th…

  PublisherDOI

• What Is New about ‘New Hindutva’?

  2022-05-31 · 12 citations

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This collection of essays examines the phenomenon of contemporary Hindu nationalism or 'New Hindutva' in India, the ideology that orients the popularly elected national government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People's Party) that has been in power since 2014. There is a rich body of academic work on Hindu nationalism, but its main focus is on the insurgent mass mobilizations that roiled the country in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast to this era of mandir (temple) politics, new Hin…

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• A History of Distributed Sovereignty

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-05-01 · 8 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter traces the origins and patterns of sovereignty and migration across the Indian Ocean that have been reproduced over centuries up to the present day. This is particularly visible in the way small, well-organized trading communities continue to dominate much of mercantile life across the Global Indian Ocean--a direct bequest of the Pax Britannica. British hegemony could only be established through an elaborate system of treaties and indirect rule which has left enduring legacies such…

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Frequent coauthors

• Jason Lengstorf

  University of Portland

  22 shared

• Steve Prettyman

  11 shared

• Finn Stepputat

  7 shared

• Christophe Jaffrelot

  5 shared

• Caroline Jeannerat

  St Augustine College of South Africa

  4 shared

• Samadia Sadouni

  Sciences Po Lyon

  4 shared

• Angana P. Chatterji

  University of California, Berkeley

  3 shared

• Jason Lengstorf

  University of Portland

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology

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