Ethnologie

Vita

Dr. Vibha Joshi Parkin

Dr Vibha Joshi is a research associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University from where she also obtained her doctorate in social anthropology.
She was a research fellow from 2009-11, at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen, Germany.
She is the author of the research monograph, A Matter of Belief: Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, published in September 2012 .
She has authored several articles and co-edited a special issue on Northeast India for the journal of South Asia (2007), and has co-curated the international exhibition, Naga: A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered (2008-9), on the European Naga collections and collectors at the Museum of Culture Basel and co-edited the accompanying book of the same title.
She has co-authored the book, The Land of the Nagas, published by Mapin (2004). Dr Joshi has been engaged in research among the Naga since 1985. She has also conducted research on the religion and traditional medicine of the Sahariya of Madhya Pradesh. Her present research focuses on two interlinked aspects : Indigenous religion and Christian Conversion and the role of Christianity in peace negotiations among the Naga nationalists; she is equally interested in Naga material culture, especially Naga material cultural history as perceived through the older museum collections and the contemporary revival.
She has been working with the women’s groups in Nagaland on the Naga textile collections in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Dr Joshi (along with her colleagues at Basel and Nagaland) was also instrumental in the anthropology initiative in Nagaland University which has resulted in the UGC grant for three academic posts in social anthropology at the university.