Synopsis Celebrating the work of Sylvia Vatuk, this volume highlights the intimate relationship between anthropology and history.  The nine essays in this volume are authored by a range of scholars – anthropologists, historians, and folklorists – who have been inspired and influence by Sylvia Vatuk’s extensive corpus of work on these disciplinary intersections as explored through her research on kinship and family history, gender, aging and the life cycle and politics and the law.

The essays critically examine and extend Vatuk’s contributions to such intersections of historical and ethnographic work, exploring anew the ways in which constructions of culture are inextricably tied to specific historical and political contexts.  The essays also stress the implications of such situated knowledge for contemporary understandings of history, culture and politics in present-day India.

Apart from the editors the other contributors to this important volume are Helene Basu, Srimati Basu, Tarini Bedi, Joyce Burkhalter Fluekiger, Pauline Kolenda, Gloria Goodwin Raheja, Helen E Ulrich and Pnina Werbner.