James Staples

My doctoral research, completed from SOAS, University of London (2003), was undertaken with a self-established settlement of leprosy-affected people in coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India and in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Although many of the people I worked with were physically changed by leprosy and suffering the degenerative illnesses of old age, progress towards the World Health Organisation’s goal of eliminating leprosy had led to a corresponding decrease in funding available for their care.

Against this background, my thesis (and subsequent monograph) argued that the historical and socio-cultural constitution of ‘the leper’ also provides those so defined with new opportunities to shape their social worlds. By focusing on institutions and practices (such as caste, Christianity and begging) which were identified by those I worked with as important, as well as the embodied experience of leprosy, the research explores how leprosy-affected people challenge existing power structures to represent themselves as a group with particular rights.
 
Subsequently, as an ESRC post-doctoral fellow (2003-2004) and then a British Academy post-doctoral fellow (2004-2006), I broadened my research to consider how attitudes towards negatively construed bodily differences in South India are shaped by – and shape – ideas about what constitutes completeness as a human being. A further 16-months of fieldwork with distinct categories of disabled people (including people with cerebral palsy and people with impaired vision) in Hyderabad examined how the category of disability is constituted in multiple ways, and explored how bodily differences are experienced and reconstituted by disabled people in their day-to-day interactions.

Since joining Brunel, I have conducted further research on suicide among young people in South India (the first publications from which are currently in press), and am pursuing ongoing biographical fieldwork with my long-term field assistant.

Qualifications

BA (SOAS, 1990); PhD (SOAS, 2003); PG Cert (Brunel, 2008)

 

Teaching: Anthropology of the Body, Anthropology of Disability and Difference, Dimensions of Ethnography

MSc Medical Anthropology Convenor (Spring 2012 Term)

Research Interests

South Asia (especially Telugu speaking South India); medical anthropology (leprosy, disability, anthropology of the body and pain); suicide; begging; charity; anthropology of food.

PhD Supervision

I am currently supervising students working on the politics of reproduction in North India; diabetes among Afro-Caribbeans in Britain and Trinidad; Tibetan Buddhism in exile in India and the UK; the history of nursing in India; and the Anthropology of Blood in the Britain. I am happy to receive enquiries from potential post-doctoral students interested in working on any of the themes outlined under my research interests above, and in particular those to keen to pursue interests in South Asia and/or the anthropology of disability.

Publications

Journal Papers

(Accepted) Staples, J., Suicide in South Asia: Ethnographic perspectives, Contributions to Indian Sociology forthcoming 2012

(Accepted) Staples, J., The suicide niche: Accounting for self-harm in a South Indian leprosy colony, Contributions to Indian Sociology forthcoming 2012

(2011) Staples, J., At the intersection of disability and masculinity: Exploring gender and bodily difference in india, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (3) : 545- 562

(2011) Staples, J., Nuancing 'leprosy stigma' through ethnographic biography in South India, Leprosy Review 82 (2) : 109- 123

(2011) Staples, J., Interrogating leprosy 'stigma': Why qualitative insights are vital, Leprosy Review 82 (2) : 91- 97

(2008) Staples, J., 'Go on, just try some!': Meat and meaning-making among South Indian Christians, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 31 (1) : 36- 55

(2007) Staples, J., The “leper” and the State in South India, Economic and Political Weekly: a journal of current economic and political affairs

(2005) Staples, J., Leprosy in South India: The paradox of disablement as enablement, Review of Disability Studies 1 (4) : 13- 28

(2005) Staples, J., Becoming a man: Personhood and masculinity in a south Indian leprosy colony, Contributions to Indian Sociology 39 (2) : 279- 305

(2004) Staples, J., Delineating disease: Self-management of leprosy identities in South India, Medical Anthropology: cross-cultural studies in health and illness 23 (1) : 69- 88

(2003) Staples, J., Disguise, revelation and copyright: Disassembling the South Indian leper, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9 (2) : 295- 315

(Accepted) Staples, J., Ethnographies of suicide in South Asia, Contributions to Indian Sociology forthcoming 2012

Book Chapters

(2009) Staples, J., Body. In: Barnard, AJ. and Spencer, J. eds. The Routledge encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology. Taylor & Francis

(2007) Staples, J., When things are not as they seem: Untangling the webs that hold together a South Indian NGO. In: Smith, M. ed. Negotiating Boundaries and Borders: Qualitative Methodology and Development Research. Oxford : Elsevier (8) : 131- 154

Books

(2007) Staples, J., Livelihoods at the margins: Surviving the city. Left Coast Press

(2007) Staples, J., Peculiar people, amazing lives: leprosy, social exclusion and community making in South India. Orient Longman