Ina is a social anthropologist who has been working on issues around the Maoist civil war, migration, and social change in Nepal. Before joining King's College London, she was a Departmental Lecturer at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.

Research

• Social Anthropology
• Anthropology of War and Violence
• Anthropology of Migration
• Economic Anthropology

Over the past decade, Ina has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the mid-Western hills of the Nepali Himalayas - the heartland of the Maoist insurgency during the civil war of 1996-2006, home to a vibrant but rapidly changing shamanic tradition, and, more recently, a hotbed of (ir)regular international migration to the USA and beyond. Her main research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of violence and social suffering, practice theory, and the anthropology of migration, with a focus on transnational family networks, debt-driven migration, and economies of waiting and hope under late capitalism. She has started developing an interest in the anthropology of religion and the invisible world through her work on 'reluctant shamans' and Christian conversion among one of the indigenous groups in Nepal. Ina is the author of Maoist People's War and the Revolution of Everyday Life in Nepal (CUP 2019).

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 5YYD0022 Anthropological Approaches to Social Justice, Power, and Inequalities

Postgraduate

• 7YYDN054 Anthropology of Violence and Social Suffering

PhD Supervision

Ina is happy to supervise students who have similar research interests and who are interested in conducting anthropological research and use ethnographic research methods.

Key publications

Monographs

2019 Maoist People’s War and the Revolution of Everyday Life in Nepal. Cambridge University Press.

Articles, book chapters, and blogs

2024 ‘Reluctant Shamans: on the Limits of Human Agency and the Power of the Partible Souls among the Kham Magars of Nepal’. In ed.by A. de Sales and M. Lecomte-Tilouine Encounters with the Invisible: Revisiting Spirit Possession in the Himalayas, pp. 58-76.  Routledge.

2022 ‘From Fraternal Nations to Fratricidal War?’ Making Sense of the War in Ukraine, COMPAS Blog Series.

2021 ‘We are in the Process’: the Exploitation of Hope and the Political Economy of Waiting among the Aspiring Irregular Migrants in Nepal’,  Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (as part of the edited issue  ‘The Labour of Hope: Affect, Oscillation, Power’) 39 (5): 827-843.

2019 ’Money and Blood: Remittances as a Substance of Relatedness in Transnational Families in Nepal’, American Anthropologist 121 (4): 884-896.

2019  ‘‘Bringing the Light’: Youth, Development, and Everyday Politics in post-conflict Nepal’, European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 53: 70-108.

2019  ‘Gender, Marriage, and the Dynamic of (Im)mobility in Transnational Families in Mid-Western Nepal’, Mobilities 14 (5): 681-695.

2018 (with Jo Boyden) ‘The Impact of Development on Children’, in the International Encyclopaedia of Anthropology (ed. by Paul Sillitoe).

2017 ‘Rules that Apply in Times of Crisis’: Time, Agency and Norm-Remaking during the People’s War in Nepal’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 (4): 783-800.

2017 (with Virginia Morrow, Nardos Chuta and Yisak Tafere) ‘I started working because I was hungry’: the Consequences of Food Insecurity on Children’s Well-being in rural Ethiopia, Social Science and Medicine 182: 1-9.

2016 ‘When Gods Return to their Homeland in the Himalayas’: Maoism, Religion and Change in the Model Village of Thabang, mid-Western Nepal’, in D. Gellner, S. Hauser and C. Letizia (eds) Religion, Secularism and Ethnicity in Contemporary Nepal, pp. 77-114. Delhi: Oxford University Press India.

2015 ‘De-mythologizing the ‘’Village of Resistance’: How Rebellious were the Peasants in the Maoist base area of Nepal?’, Dialectical Anthropology, 39 (4): 353-379.

2013 ‘Learning in a Guerrilla Community of Practice: Situated Learning, Literacy Practices and Youth in Nepal’s Maoist Movement ’, European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 42 (Spring-Summer Issue): 104-134.

2009 ‘A New Way of being Young in Nepal: the Idea of Maoist Youth and Dreams of a New Man’, Studies in Nepali History and Society, 14 (1): 67-107. 

Further details

See Ina's research profile