Anand Vaidya
Associate Professor of Anthropology
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On sabbatical 2024-25.
Environmental politics, law, social movements, land and property, political economy, collective action, caste, indigeneity, India, South Asia.
A.M., Ph.D., Harvard University
B.A., Swarthmore College
Anand Vaidya is an anthropologist of social movements, political economy, and environmental politics in India. His research on these topics has focused on law as it both reflects and reframes environmental and political struggles. Vaidya’s first book, Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India (Cornell University Press 2025), tracks the political life of India’s landmark Forest Rights Act, a 2006 law that recognizes the tenure and use rights of India’s millions of landless forest dwellers. The Forest Rights Act is the product of years of mobilization and struggle, and its text reflects the many contradictory political visions that led to the law’s passage. By following the law as it was made and brought to a forest village in North India, the book argues for an understanding of legal meaning as emergent from collective action.
Publications
“Fantasy Constitutions: Forest land and forced dispossession.” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, Vol. 95, 2023.
“New Villages for Old: Collective Action and Conditional Futures after India’s Forest Rights Act.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2022.
With Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Kenneth Bo Nielsen. “Theorizing Law, Social Movements and State Formation in India.” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2022.
Indian Democracy: Origins, Trajectories, Contestations. Alf Nilsen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, and Anand Vaidya, eds. Pluto Press, 2019.
“‘Word Traps’ and the Drafting of India’s Forest Rights Act.” In Staking Claims: The Politics of Social Movements in Contemporary Rural India, Uday Chandra and Daniel Taghioff, eds., pp 292-316. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Courses
ANTH 211 Introduction to Anthropology
ANTH 201 Global Political Ecology
ANTH 320 South Asia through Social Movements
CRES 300/ANTH 371 Caste and Race
ANTH 375 Anthropology of Science
ANTH 377 Land, Labor, and Value in India’s Environment
ANTH 391 Legal Anthropology
ANTH 425 Marx from the South