Ajay Gandhi is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His interests are in urban, political, and economic anthropology, with a focus on South Asia. He was a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG) in Göttingen (2011-2017), and received his PhD in Anthropology from Yale University in 2010. He has published on transactional and material forms, postcolonial jurisdiction, human-animal relations, urban friction, and social aesthetics and concepts.

• Phenomenology, specifically how social practice is embodied, experienced, and performed.
• Language and its symbolic and interpretive dimensions; the history and form of political concepts and everyday metaphors.
• The urban condition: how cities are imagined and struggled over; their everyday civilities and historical materialities.
• Postcolonial nation-states: asymmetries of entitlement, aspects of bureaucratic mediation, practices of ethno-religious accommodation.
• Transactional sociality, encompassing cultural grammars of exchange and reciprocity, and the moral and material dimensions of value.
• The Indian Ocean: the durability of transnational connections, the multiplicity of regulation and jurisdiction, the social dynamics of port-cities.