Susan S. Wadley

Professor, Anthropology

Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies
Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
Director, South Asia Center

Degree

Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1973

Specialties

Social change, demography, religion, folklore, performance studies, gender issues, India

Biography

My research interests currently focus on three rather disparate topics. The first is an examination of culture change in rural India as it responds to ‘globalization’. This relates to my previous work on popular religion, oral traditions, and public culture. Second, I am concerned with women’s changing roles and the relationship of social change to patterns of education, fertility and women’s status more generally.  This also relates to what anthropologists are now calling ‘companionate’ marriage, that is new patterns of marriage found in many non Euro-American societies in which marriage is now see as something closer to the Euro-American ‘love’ marriage. My final interest takes me out of India completely, as I am exploring women’s roles in Upstate New York at the end of the 19th  century.

Most of my work is based in the village known as Karimpur, made famous by William and Charlotte Wiser in Behind Mud Walls. Last year, I wrote a new chapter for Behind Mud Walls that takes readers up to the late 20th century. I have also published a book on social change over the past sixty years in the village known as Karimpur in rural Uttar Pradesh, India (Struggling with Destiny in Karimpur, 1925-1984). This community sees the old paradigm of control by landlords and family heads being challenged by education, urban employment, migration, and changes in family relationships. Using the voices of men and women, rich and poor, high caste and low caste, I examine the different constructions given to Karimpur history.

Karimpur has also made it to the WEB. Using a slide show designed by Don Johnson of NYU who visited the village regularly in the 1960s and 1970s and who was a friend of Charlotte Wiser, co-author of Behind Mud Walls, we have designed a WEB page that reflects life and change in this community http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/moynihan/programs/sac/outreach/karimpur/default.asp

A second WEB page project emerges from the two National Endowment for the Humanities institutes for high school teachers that I taught in 1994 and 1997. These four week institutes focused on the Ramayana – its history, its relationships to changing social and cultural norms, its presentation in art and drama. Teachers at the institutes created lesson plans and instructional materials that have been added to: these are found at http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/moynihan/programs/sac/Outreach/ramayana/index.asp

Currently, I am Associate Dean for Curriculum, Instruction and Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences. This somewhat limits my teaching (and research writing), but allows me to work closely with SU Abroad, and to develop new programs at SU, including minors in Muslim Cultures and Transnational Asian Studies.

Beginning January, 2009, I will again be Director of the South Asia Center, funded as a National Resource Center for South Asia by the U.S. Dept. of Education. The Center provides FLAS fellowships for American citizens or green card holders to study South Asia at SU. It also funds numerous lectures, film series and courses.

Lastly, I am co-director of the Gender and Globalization Initiative in the Global Affairs Institute. This Initiative serves as a location for lectures, course opportunities, workshops, and research on gender and globalization. We have also instituted a Gender and Globalization book series at Syracuse University Press.

Publications

2008 Wife, Mother, Widow: Exploring Women’s Lives in Northern India. New Delhi: Chronicle Books.

2005 Raja Nal and the Goddess: The North Indian Oral Epic Dhola in Performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

2005 Essays on North Indian Folk Traditions. New Delhi: Chronicle Books

2004 Behind Mud Walls. (reprint). New Delhi: Chronicle Books.

2004 “Assessing the Public Sphere: Dhola and Transformations over Time. In MD. Muthukumaraswamy and Molly Kaushal, eds., Folklore, Public Sphere and Civil Society.  Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi and National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai. Pp  211-224.

2004 “Grama” in The Hindu World, edited by Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby, New York Routledge:  pp 429-445. 

2002   "Raja Nal and the Rajputs: Seeking Status in the Oral Epic Dhola.", In Culture, Communities, and Change. Varsha Joshi, ed. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, pp. 104-132.

2002  "The Domination of Indira." In The Village in India, Vandana Madan, ed. Delhi: Oxford University Press. pp. 373-390.

2002 "Mithila Paintings." In Beneath the Banyan Tree: Ritual, Remembrance, and Storytelling in Performed North Indian Folk Arts. Joe and Emily Lowe Art Gallery, VPA, Syracuse University, pp. 12-20.

2002 "One Straw from a Broom Cannot Sweep: The Ideology and Practice of the Joint Family in Rural North India." In Everyday Life in South Asia, Sarah Lamb and Diane Mines, eds., Indiana University Press, pp.11-22.

2001 "The Village in 1998." In Behind Mud Walls: Seventy Five Years in a North Indian Village. Updated and expanded edition. With new chapters by Susan S. Wadley, Foreward by David G. Mandelbaum. By William and Charlotte Wiser. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 319-364.

2001 "Popular Culture and the North Indian Oral Epic Dhola." Indian Folklore Research Journal, 1: 13-24.

2000 "From Sacred Cow Dung to Cow ‘shit’: Globalization and Local Religious Practices in Rural North India." Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 12: 1-28.

2000 "Negotiating New Rules and Values: Four Generations of Rural North Indian Women." Proceedings of the Conference on Quality of Life in South Asia., Hiroshima, Japan.

1999 "A Bhakti Rendition of Nala-Damayanti: Todar Mal’s ‘Nectar of the Life of Nal’." International Journal of Hindu Studies.

1998 "Creating a Modern Epic: Oral and Written Versions of the Hindi Epic Dhola" In Lauri Honko, Jawarharlal Handoo, John Miles Foley, eds. The Epic: Oral and Written. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages, pp. 151-162.

1998 "Raja Nal’s Humanity: Understanding the North Indian Epic Dhola as a Native Anthropology." In Jawaharlal Handoo, ed. Folklore in Modern India. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages, pp.163-174.

1998 "From Village to City to World: Changing the Paradigm of Anthropological Research in India." In Joseph Elder, ed., After Fifty Years: American Studies of India. Manohar Books, New Delhi, pp. 111-138.

1998 "Women to Woman: Charlotte Wiser’s Srimati." Manushi, no. 107, pp. 16-23.

1995 "No Longer a Wife: Widows in Rural North India." In Lindsay Harlan & Paul Courtright, eds., From the Margins of Hindu Marriage: Essays on Gender, Religion and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 92-118.

1995 Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia. (Co-Editor) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

1993 Struggling with Destiny in Karimpur, 1925-1984. University of California Press.

1993 "The 'Village India': A Brahman Widow and Political Action in Rural North India." In D. Lyons Johnson, ed., Balancing Acts: Women and the Process of Social Change. Boulder: Westview, pp 65-87.

1993 "Family Composition Strategies in Rural North India." Social Science and Medicine 37:1367-1376.

1989 "Karimpur 1925-1984: Understanding Rural India through Restudies." In P. Bardhan, ed. Conversations between Anthropologists and Economists: Issues in the Measurement of Economic Change in Rural India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

1989 Oral Epics in India. (Co-Editor) Berkeley: University of California Press.

1988 "Female Life Changes in Rural India." Cultural Survival Quarterly 13:35-39.

1986 "The Katha of Sakat: Two Tellings." In Blackburn and Ramanujan, eds. Another Harmony: New Approaches to South Asian Folklore, Berkeley: University of California Press.