Sara Shneiderman

*All royalties from the sale of Rituals of Ethnicity will be donated to organizations supporting Thangmi communities of Dolakha and Sindhupalchok to rebuild after the 2015 earthquakes devastated their villages.*

I am a socio-cultural anthropologist working in the Himalayan regions of Nepal, India, and China's Tibetan Autonomous Region. My research explores the relationships between political discourse, ritual action, and cross-border mobility in producing ethnic identities and shaping social transformation. Current research projects include an ethnography of "post-conflict" state restructuring in Nepal that focuses on lived experiences of citizenship, territory and religiosity since 2006, and an exploration of trans-Himalayan citizenship across the historical and contemporary borders of India, China, and Nepal. In the wake of Nepal's April and May 2015 earthquakes, I am engaged in relief efforts focused on rural areas.

I have also published several articles on the themes of Nepal's Maoist movement; ethnic classification, affirmative action, and the politics of recognition in South Asia; and borders and citizenship in the Himalaya. I am currently preparing another manuscript that presents Thangmi ritual texts in Nepali and English translation. This is a collaborative project with an indigenous Thangmi researcher, a Nepali translator, and a linguistic anthropologist. Multimedia technologies are at the core of my ethnographic methodology, and I am a founding member of the Digital Himalaya Project.

I received my PhD (2009) and MA (2004) from Cornell University, following a BA with Honors from Brown University in both Anthropology and Religious Studies (1997). Before coming to UBC I was an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Yale University from 2011-2014, and a Research Fellow at St Catharine's College, University of Cambridge, from 2009-2011. My research has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Foundation, the British Academy, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.