Dr. Aarti Sethi

Biography

Aarti Sethi is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, specializing in socio-cultural anthropology with a focus on agrarian anthropology and political economy in South Asia. Her research examines the transformation of rural life-worlds under agrarian capitalism, particularly through the lens of cash-crop agricultural economies and the implications of monetary debt in transgenic cotton cultivation. Sethi's work addresses the intimate and social relations within rural society and engages with issues of political economies in small-holder agrarian production amidst climate change. She is currently involved in a project titled Republic Readers, which investigates reading, literacy, and citizenship within postcolonial democracy. Sethi's ethnographic research is rooted in South Asia and seeks to contribute to broader discussions about agrarian change and the evolution of agricultural practices in the context of modern industrial capitalism. Her interests extend to agrarian technology, the social implications of knowledge and literacy, and interdisciplinary approaches that intertwine anthropology, history, and multi-species ethnography. Before her role at UC Berkeley, she earned degrees in political science, cinema, and cultural studies from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. Additionally, Sethi has held postdoctoral fellowships at Brown and Harvard University.

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