Nobody's People

Anastasia Piliavsky is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Politics at the India Institute at King's College London. She is the editor of Patronage as Politics in South Asia (2014).

"It's difficult to overemphasize the effect of this narrative: the brio with which it is written, the verve of its characters, the author's intellectual panache. This scintillating re-reading of hierarchy, most poignant where it has supposedly been banished, picks apart one of anthropology's greatest conundrums and poses profound questions for evaluations based on social equivalence."—Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge "Moving away from the ideas of ineffability and stasis that attach to understandings of caste, Piliavsky puts forward a courageous, refreshingly original position on hierarchy."—Dilip Menon, University of Witwatersrand "An extraordinary work. A major rethinking of the social productivity of hierarchical relations, this is ethnographically grounded anthropological theorizing at its best. It should fundamentally transform contemporary conversations about the nature of social life."—Joel Robbins, University of Cambridge "By exploring the politics of everyday patronage, this compelling study of a 'caste of thieves' addresses one of the most important debates in the sociology of South Asia."—Filippo Osella, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies, Sussex University

• 0. Prologue1. Hierarchy as Hope2. The Lords of Begun3. The People Who Were Not There4. The Perils of Masterless People5. How to Make and Eat a Goddess in Nine Days6. Who and Whose7. The New Lords of Begun8. Every Man a King