Eial Dujovny

Eial Dujovny is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Ecological and Environmental Anthropology at UGA and a student associate of the Center for Integrative Conservation Research. Following twenty-two months of field research in India, Dujovny is presently at CICR writing his dissertation titled: Caste as Social Network – A Study of Social Relations between Fishers and Non-Fishers in Chilika Lake, Orissa, India (subject to change).

Dujovny’s research melds historical and social network approaches to explore the formation of caste identities and social relations between fishers and non-fishers in the Chilika Lake basin.  The lake (which is actually a lagoon) has for over a quarter of a century been at the epicenter of the “Blue Revolution” in India and is a major source of exported prawns.  Unfortunately, the introduction of prawn aquaculture has resulted in rising tensions between the lake’s fishers and non-fisher communities as the latter have abandoned agriculture and longstanding caste prohibitions to enter the fishery.  Using Social Network Analysis, Dujovny looks at friendship networks to question whether the increasing similarity between the respective groups has resulted in a breakdown in social taboos and increased interaction at the individual level.  His findings suggest that although caste is socially and historically constructed on the one hand and subject to political, economic and modernizing pressures on the other hand, it primarily functions as a social network that continues to structure people’s social relations and access to resources.

Dujovny’s work is inspired by scholars such as Cohn, Dirks, Inden, Guha, Stokes, D'Souza, Sivaramakrishnan, Reeves, Bayly, Raheja and many others who have pursued a historical approach to understanding South Asian society and ecology through the prism of what Cohn termed "colonialism and its forms of knowledge."  In his dissertation, Dujovny demonstrates how the imposition of capitalist property rights under the colonial system of land revenue administration resulted in a strict division between rights to land and water that polarized the communities and solidified caste identities.  At the same time, he reveals the historical undercurrents that spurred the non-fisher communities to embrace aquaculture as a means of reengaging with the lake’s “wastelands” – a term that effaces the fact that, prior to the imposition of the Salt Monopoly, these territories supported the local communities in the agricultural slack season.

While Dujovny sees the historical approach as a necessary and long overdue corrective to the ahistorical and Orientalist writings on India that have depicted caste as a timeless and otherworldly phenomenon, he feels that it has also diverted attention from an exploration of how caste is actually lived today.  By employing Social Network Analysis, Dujovny’s research signals a way beyond the historical perspective to suggest a new methodological and theoretical approach to the study of caste.  He believes that this lends itself to more grounded political and dynamic analyses of caste that may be replicated in comparative and cross-cultural studies.

Last year Dujovny received the Anthropology and Environment Section's Roy A. Rappaport Graduate Student Award for the paper "The Deepest Cut: Political Ecology and Marginalization in the Dredging of a New Sea Mouth in Chilika Lake, Orissa, India" at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in San Francisco.  The paper argues that the government decision to dredge a new sea mouth in Chilika Lake was misguided because it was based on an unfounded “environmental orthodoxy” that the sea mouth was rapidly shifting northwards.  Recently, an updated version of this paper was accepted for publication in the journal Conservation and Society.  In 2007, he published “Seeing Aquaculture through Local Eyes: The Case of Chilika Lake” in Lakes and Coastal Wetlands: Conservation, Restoration, and Management (P.K. Mohanty, ed.) on the use of informant photography to elicit local environmental history.

In the future, Dujovny is interested in employing social network analysis together with stakeholder and consensus analysis to correlate ecosystem knowledge with specific groups in a community.  He believes that this promises to demonstrate the ways in which local environmental knowledge is embedded in social networks and will assist in identifying those groups that are more likely to be effective stewards of their natural resources.  After graduating this December, he plans to teach a course on the Anthropology of Bollywood Cinema while working on submitting several articles for publication.

Heading to a meeting with field assistant, Chinmaya Dash.

In the fishing villiage of Bhalabhadrapur.

At the Parikud King's palace in Krushnaprasad Garh.

Lodgings in the non-fisher village of Satapada Gada.