Embodiment, Colorism, Kinship, Gender, Caste, Communalism, Urban Life

Lucknow, India, South Asia

Katyayani Dalmia is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. After studying History and Sociology at the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, she completed her PhD in Anthropology at The New School for Social Research, New York. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research in the city of Lucknow, Katyayani’s doctoral dissertation is a study of the imaginative linkages between bodily traits and formal identity; between, that is, skin color, body size, facial features, and diet on the one hand, and positions of caste, class, religion, and gender, on the other. Katyayani has taught courses in Anthropology, gender and feminism, body and colorism. At present, she is interested in examining how ideas of etiquette associated with being from Lucknow, and notions of professional conduct – both of which contain proscriptions against making marked distinctions of community – conflict with desires for maintaining social and bodily distance with perceived others.