Dr Susan Bayly
Reader in Historical Anthropology; Fellow, Christ’s College
email: sbb10 [at] cam.ac.uk
Research interests: the study of modernity, globalisation, theories of historical change, and in the disciplinary interface between history and anthropology, colonialism and its cultural afterlife in Asia’s former French and British colonies.
As an anthropologist originally trained in history, I specialised initially in Indian religion and the lived experience of south Asia’s caste system. Thereafter, with the aim of making a distinctive, historically informed contribution to anthropology, I began to explore both the French and British empires as settings for divergent interactions between Western and non-Western peoples, focusing since 2000 on fieldwork in Vietnam. My Vietnam fieldwork has been with formerly francophone Hanoi intelligentsia families, exploring what I am calling the socialist world system as an arena of active, choice-making ‘socialist moderns’ who have handled the legacies of empire and its turbulent aftermath as makers of a wide range of colonial, postcolonial and socialist modernities.
Supplemented by ethnographic and archival work in France, my current fieldwork in Vietnam has been with women and men from Hanoi intelligentsia backgrounds. I have travelled with them to view the sites of their turbulent childhoods in the revolutionary ‘liberated zones’ during the 1946-54 Independence War, and have shared intensive family discussions of their experiences in the state-sponsored diaspora of development specialists recruited to work in former French colonies including Algeria, Madagascar and Guinée.
