Bob Pokrant (Curtin University of Technology)

submitted: Mon, 31 Oct 1994 14:27:03 WST +800

Dr. Bob Pokrant 
Lecturer in Anthropology 
School of Social Sciences and Asian Languages
Curtin University of Technology
GPO Box U1987
Perth, WA, 6001, AUSTRALIA

phone: 619-351-7873
FAX:   619-351-3166
email: POKRANT@SPECTRUM.CURTIN.EDU.AU

RESEARCH INTERESTS: I am a member of the South Asia research Unit at
Curtin which is the main centre for South Asian studies in Western
Australia. The main project I am working on at present deals with the
transformation of Indian artisanal fisheries during the British colonial
period. This study is a joint project between myself and two historians at
Curtin and is examining the changes that ocurred to India's small-scale
fishers and their communities as a consequence of British colonial rule.
The first phase of the project examines the transformation of Bengal's
inland fisheries drawing on archival, ethnographic and other sources to
reconstruct the organisation of, and change in, the work and market
relations among Bengali fishers from c. 1793 to 1950. Two research visits
to India and Bangladesh were undertaken in 1993 and 1994. Ethnographic
work in selected districts of Bangladesh is planned for 1995 and will
result in a comparison of the situation prevailing today with that found
at various times during British colonial rule and during the period of
Pakistani control from 1947 to 1971. Another aspect of this phase of the
project concerns the cultural significance of fish in Bengali society.
Using literary, mythological and ethnographic sources, the role of, and
meanings attached to, fish in various aspects of Hindi and Muslim Bengali
life, e.g., marriage, health, the fishing labour process etc., are
examined. Later phases of the project will concentrate on fish curing
yards on the Konkan, Coromandel and Malabar coasts, c. 1870 to 1940.

TEACHING INTERESTS I teach a second/third year unit on the anthropology of
South Asia which is organised around the three themes of gender, ethnicity
and class. The aim of the unit is to introduce the student to these three
modes of domination and loci of identity drawing on material from North
and South India and Bangladesh. Comparisons are drawn across Hindu, Muslim
and Christian communities. Issues dealt with include community and
communalism, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, relationship of gender to
religious nationalism, the debate over dowry and the subordination of
women, 'tribal' South Asia, the changing role of caste in Indian life and
the increasing importance of class-based divisions in rural and urban
areas, anthropology and the debate over orientalism, and agrarian change.