Shaila Seshia Galvin PhD ‘13 is associate professor of anthropology and sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She graduated from the joint PhD program in Anthropology and Environmental Science. Her book Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian Himalaya, was published in 2021 with Yale University Press.
Can you tell me about your background and research?
I did my PhD in the joint program in anthropology and environmental studies at Yale, beginning in 2004. I was drawn to Yale because of my longstanding interest in agrarian and environmental issues, particularly in South Asia. It seemed to me that Yale was the perfect place to pursue these interests, having what is now the Yale School of the Environment (then called the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies), the Program in Agrarian Studies, and a very strong South Asian Studies Council to provide regional expertise across disciplines.
Before coming to Yale, I had completed my undergraduate degree in political science at the University of British Columbia (UBC), a big public university in Canada with amazing professors and full of great experiences. One of the most formative for me was a summer exchange program in India, where I traveled to different regions and visited many NGOs and universities. This exchange program helped solidify my academic interest in studying environmental politics in India more closely, an interest that also sprang out of my own personal connections to India—my father is Indian, from Chennai and Mumbai, and we visited every few years during my childhood growing up in Canada. It was with the encouragement of one of my professors at UBC, who taught comparative politics of South Asia, that I decided to pursue an MPhil at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. The experience of interdisciplinary research was something I really valued during my Master’s, and also one of the reasons why Yale was such an exciting place for me to pursue a PhD. Over my years in the PhD program, I appreciated enormously the way the South Asian Studies Council convened faculty and students from across Yale’s campus, faculties, and departments.
In terms of my own interests, they have remained very much centered around the intersection of environmental and agrarian questions. During my master’s, I focused on the development of intellectual property rights over seeds and plant varieties. I was very interested in the notion of farmers’ rights and how that was articulated in national legislation, how rights were framed through legislation, and what the accordance of these rights afforded in practice. Over my first few years in the PhD program my specific interests shifted, and I became interested in studying the development of commercial organic agriculture in Uttarakhand. I spent two years in Uttarakhand looking at how and why the state, which was then India’s newest state, was embarking on a program of certified organic agriculture. The Uttarakhand experience seemed to be an outlier in the larger context of agricultural development trends in India, and that captivated me and drew my interest through the PhD and in the years afterward.
I finished my PhD in 2013 and the book was published in 2021. In those years, I had a young family and I moved from being a PhD student to a postdoctoral fellow at Williams College in Massachusetts, and then into a faculty position as an assistant professor in Geneva, Switzerland—they were busy years, full of big life changes. Having young children, moving, and settling into new professional positions also meant that preparing my book manuscript took longer, which gave me some time to step back and think about what I had done and what I wanted to do. I made the decision to shift the focus away a bit from questions of state formation in Uttarakhand and toward questions of the organic and what it meant to become organic. I came to realize that a lot of my research, even though I didn’t fully perceive it at the time, was actually engaging with how people who were differently positioned within the state bureaucracy, certification agencies, private companies, and cultivating communities were thinking about what becoming organic meant and grappling with what it demanded of them. As a result, some of the questions I had pursued in the dissertation, such as those related to processes of state formation in Uttarakhand, receded a bit. I came to examine the quality of becoming, and being, organic, and consider how this could be understood both historically and in relation to contemporary processes of agricultural development in India.
You published Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian Himalaya, the book that grew out of your dissertation, in 2021. What projects are you working on now?
I’m currently leading Accounting for Nature: Agriculture and Mitigation in the Era of Global Climate Change, which is research project that very much maintains my long-standing commitments to study issues at the intersection of the agrarian and the environmental. This particular project looks at how climate change mitigation, that is, the reduction or removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, is being developed and enacted in agrarian locales. Funnily enough, it was in Uttarakhand that the seed for this project was planted, because I remember having a conversation toward the end of my fieldwork with someone who spoke speculatively about the potential of Uttarakhand’s forests for carbon sequestration. In this project, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, I supervise a PhD student who is working in northeastern India and a postdoctoral fellow in Argentina and Colombia. My own field work will actually be in Alberta, Canada, some distance from where I grew up. It’s quite a shift from Uttarakhand, particularly because of the overwhelming presence of the fossil fuel industry in Alberta. But certain questions of environmental justice, narratives about nature and environmental degradation, and the histories and ongoing legacies of projects of resource development carry across these regions as do things like processes of standardization and certification, which are features of both the organic and carbon credit worlds.
What was your time like at Yale?
I couldn’t have asked for a better doctoral experience. In many ways it exceeded what I had thought was possible when I arrived. The ability to have one foot in an academic and disciplinary department (Anthropology), but also to be connected to a professional school (Yale School of the Environment) with its own multidisciplinary faculty was really interesting to me. Having come to the PhD from development studies background, when I started my PhD I was not actually sure where I wanted to go after—that is, whether I wanted to pursue an academic career or work in a professional capacity on development and environmental issues. For this reason, the opportunity to be based in both a professional school a disciplinary department allowed me to navigate and explore these different possible trajectories. Obviously, certain debates and ideas and coursework I was doing in the anthropology department were very different from those at YSE, and at times I wondered how to reconcile the two. But I found that to be a productive challenge and productive tension; being able to be in that position was something I was grateful for.
A few years into my time at Yale, just before I was leaving for field work, K. Sivaramakrishnan (Shivi) arrived at the anthropology department. I was delighted because his work had already been a huge inspiration to me in developing the early stages of my PhD. I was really happy to have the chance to work with him, and he has been an extraordinary advisor and mentor. At the time I was completing my PhD, he was chair of South Asian Studies Council and I saw the SASC grow so much during his time through the vision that he brought to it. With his encouragement and support, and that of Kasturi Gupta, as well as a number of other faculty, there developed a very strong cohort of PhD students across departments. It was a really vibrant space to meet people, to discuss each other’s work, to learn about fascinating research in other fields and disciplines that I never would have otherwise had the chance to do were it not for the SASC. I remember going to seminars given by art historians, political scientists, religious studies scholars—their research interests and questions were in many senses quite different from my own, and yet my own development as a scholar of the region owes so much to the Council.
What advice would you give to younger scholars?
It’s important to have a personal commitment to what you do. The PhD is a long process, and the path that follows afterward is not always straightforward. So it is not about doing what you think is the “right” thing to do, or trying to anticipate what will be hot research topics, as much as it is about have a feeling of curiosity, of commitment and, I would say, deep care for what you do. The chance to learn with and from others in such an intense way is a great richness of graduate study. I benefited a huge amount from the opportunity to be involved in different spaces; during my time at Yale there were so many spaces for graduate students to present their work, workshop ideas, draft chapters, write outlines, join collectives, and labs and writing groups. Those are all really precious experiences. Afterwards you don’t find those spaces in the same way, even if the ethics of generosity and scholarly care that I discovered in these settings are ones that I try to carry with me now. To the extent that you have them now around you at Yale, I would definitely make the most of that. Through them, you will develop friendships and connections that will last after your studies.
You also did something slightly unusual during your PhD: you had children. Can you speak a little about what that was like?
I have three kids. They were all born while I was doing the PhD, our eldest just as I was defending my prospectus, the second shortly after I returned from my fieldwork, and the third about three weeks before I defended my PhD. The figure of the anthropologist, at least historically, was often of a lone, usually male, figure. This is much less true today of course, and my experience of fieldwork was pretty different from that of many of the scholars whose works have been considered classics of the discipline. I was not alone, but there with my family—my husband was working in Delhi and I was in Uttarakhand. Fieldwork with a baby was not easy, but we were fortunate to be able to find a wonderful person who would come with me when I was conducting fieldwork and who helped look after my son. So, the support of others, and most especially Kamala, our ayah, is what made my fieldwork possible. Those relationships aren’t always made visible or talked about among academics, but they’re so vital in many ways for sustaining possibilities for research. We’re still in touch with Kamala and her family; we saw them earlier this year when we returned to Uttarakhand as a family for the first time since my fieldwork ended.
In terms of writing the dissertation, I lived in graduate housing near the Divinity School in the final years of my PhD. It was wonderful, because we were with other graduate students who also had kids, although there were many more graduate student dads with kids than graduate student mothers! Over the course of my time in the PhD program, Yale got much better at addressing issues faced by graduate student parents. My two advisors, Shivi and Michael Dove, were also unfailingly supportive throughout, which meant, and continues to mean, a great deal to me.
Anthropology is an interesting discipline because it demands a lot of oneself personally. Typically, the fieldwork is long and intensive, and there can be this sense of needing to be hyper-mobile. It’s not always evident how one does that. Whether or not one has children, many of us have relationships of care and responsibility of one kind or another, and those can be at odds with long-held views of what anthropological fieldwork is and should look like. I think that in some ways, anthropology needs to come to terms with, or at least demystify, some of its practices around fieldwork, and nurture space in which new fieldwork practices can emerge.
Byline: Daevan Mangalmurti