Announcement

Applications are invited from interested individuals interested in participating in the symposium being held to celebrate the work of David N. Gellner on 22 July 2025 (Tuesday) in Kathmandu.

David Gellner, Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, and a Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, retired in September 2024. His teaching and research career in the field of social and cultural anthropology spanned over 40 years. Gellner’s research has always focused primarily on Nepal, although he has also carried out some fieldwork in Japan and in India (eastern UP). His doctoral work was on religion, ritual, and social aspects of Newar Buddhism, resulting in the monograph, Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and Its Hierarchy of Ritual (1992), as well as many articles. Subsequently, he and Declan Quigley brought out the edited volume, Contested Hierarchies: A Collaborative Ethnography of Caste among the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal (1995), a major statement on Newar social organization.

Over the years, Gellner’s research interests, and the topics he has published on, expanded to include: healers, mediums, and misfortune; Theravada Buddhism and religious reform; caste and Dalits; nationalism, ethnicity, and politics; activism, elections, and civil society; borderlands; Nepali diaspora populations and migration; schools and education; secularism and religious change; and inequality, class, and cultural consumption. To these can be added occasional publications on anthropological history, anthropological methods, and Max Weber. What distinguishes Gellner’s approach is that he is equally interested both in cultural specificities and nuances (as befits a scholar who studied Sanskrit and knows Nepali and Nepalbhasa/Newari) and in structural constraints and forces. He is never tempted to reduce one or other side either to irrelevance or to being a simple product or reflex of the other side. Nor does he share the conventional anthropological prejudice against quantitative methods.

As indicated by the early collection, Contested Hierarchies, Gellner has continually sought out diverse research collaborations in order to broaden the range of his work. He has led numerous projects to bring foreign and Nepali scholars together to the advantage of both. He always encouraged his students to consider original scholarship produced by native authors in their own languages along with the works produced by scholars in foreign languages. He has published 25 books and supervised more than 50 PhDs over the course of his career. Four of those students contributed chapters to his edited volume Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia (2013). He has played a great role in promoting the exchange of academic knowledge and scholarship between UK academic institutions and individuals and institutions in South Asia, particularly Nepal. He is a founding member of the Britain-Nepal Academic Council (BNAC) and a founding advisor of the Centre for Nepal Studies UK (CNSUK).

To mark his retirement and to celebrate his critical role in advancing social anthropology, particularly with reference to religion and society in Nepal and South Asia, this symposium has been organised and curated by convenors Krishna Adhikari, Lokendra Purush Dhakal, Shrochis Karki, Chiara Letizia & Uma Pradhan, and is being hosted by Social Science Baha on 22 July 2025 under the aegis of its Nanda R. and Pamela L. Shrestha Fund for Honouring Nepal Scholars, a day before the 2025 Annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya commences.

There are a few places available at the symposium for those interested in attending. You can apply for by filling out the form available here. Selected participants will be notified by email. Participation is free but those selected will be required to pay a refundable deposit of NPR 1500 to secure their place.

Programme