Bhoomika Joshi

Bhoomika Joshi is socio-cultural anthropologist (Yale University ’23) of the Indian Himalayas, development, mobility, caste, and gender. Her dissertation ‘Attachments to Hurt: The Intimate Economy of Mobility and Enterprise in the Indian Himalayas’ presents an ethnographic account, a social history and an affective theory of mobility, enterprise and caste through the story of ‘drivery’ in Uttarakhand. It provides an account of post-Mandal  neo-liberal India which centres the gendered attachments of upper-caste-ness to an affective politics of hurt in a majority and majoritarian upper-caste demography of Uttarakhand. In doing so, her ethnography moves between scales of imagination and action such that the contradiction of political and intimate projects can be read together to examine the intimate life of a global condition.
In addition to her publications, Bhoomika has also written for public academic forum like Sapiens (Wenner-Gren Foundation) and Platypus (Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing) as well as several media outlets and newspapers in English and in Hindi. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. She is a bilingual writer and translator, and author of a Hindi novella, Lachchhi: The Newness of Nostalgia (Vani Publications 2020). 

Publications 

(Forthcoming) Joshi, B. Friendly Nations and Open Borders: Gender, Caste and Sacredness at the India-Nepal Border, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.  
(Forthcoming) Joshi, B. Calling names: Humouring Caste & Caste-ing Humour, American Anthropologist. 
(Forthcoming) Joshi, B. Landscape aesthetics of remoteness in the Indian Himalayas, Himalaya: Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Awarded the Dor Bahadur Bista Prize, Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS)
2023 Joshi, B. ‘What I didn’t tell you’. Un/tracing Empire: Pollinations between the Poetic and the Ethnographic, Visual and New Media Review, Cultural Anthropology
2021 Joshi, B. “In Our Time”: Generation as Critical Demography, Issues: A Multilingual Journal of Short Essays (2); Bilingual essays in Hindi and English
2021 Govindarajan, R, Joshi, B. and Rizvi, M. (eds.) Majoritarian Politics in South Asia, Hotspots for Cultural Anthropology: Theorizing the Contemporary
2021 Joshi, B. Passengers to Pilgrims: Micro cartographies of Sacredness in the Indian Himalayas, Hotspots for Cultural Anthropology: Theorizing the Contemporary
2015 Joshi, B. ‘Drivery’ in Uttarakhand: Memes of Mobility and Socio-spatial Transformation. Economic and Political Weekly (50) 1: 17-21