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Thomas Blom Hansen (born 22 January 1958 inFrederiksvaerk) is aDanish anthropologist and commentator on religious and political violence inIndia.
Hansen has a BA in Sociology and an MA in political theory from theUniversity of Aalborg in Denmark. He then did development work in Orissa, India, in the mid-1980s. He became interested in anthropology during a PhD on Indian nationalism in Pune and Mumbai in western India, begun in the late 1980s when he was unexpectedly granted a research visa to study nationalism.[1] He graduated fromRoskilde University and his D.Phil. was later made into a book (The Saffron Wave, 1999).
Hansen taught in the multidisciplinary International Development Studies program at Roskilde University until 1999, becoming associate professor. He spent one year as a visiting scholar at theUniversity of Natal (Durban) in 1998–99, where he also began new research. He then became a reader in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in late 1999, resigning to become professor of anthropology atYale University. In 2006, he accepted a chair of religion and society at theUniversity of Amsterdam, where he also served as dean of the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences. Since 2010 he has been the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor in South Asian Studies and professor in anthropology atStanford University. He also serves as director of Stanford's Center for South Asia.[2]
He has two children with his first wife, and is married to an assistant professor at StanfordSharika Thiranagama, daughter of the Tamil activistRajini Thiranagama (1954 –1989).[3][4] They have a son and daughter.
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Hansen's research in India focused initially on the rise of Hindu nationalism. He began a study of its local roots and organization in Pune, one of the historical strongholds of the larger Hindu nationalist movement. Later, he studied the Shiv Sena, a powerful militant movement in Mumbai that played a dominant role in the political and social life for several decades. This was in the early 1990s when violent clashes occurred between Hindu nationalists and Muslims.
In the late 1990s he worked on religious identities, local political organization and informal networks in Bombay/Mumbai (Wages of Violence, 2001).
In the late 1990s and again in 2007 he worked onreligious revival and the everyday meanings offreedom and belonging in post-apartheidSouth Africa, based in a formerly Indian township in Durban (Melancholia of Freedom, 2012).
More generally he has contributed to understanding of the anthropology ofpolitics, thepostcolonial state andsovereignty, and identity politics in urban environments.
Hansen is part of an international research network entitled "The Religious Lives of Migrants," funded by theFord Foundation and theSocial Science Research Council in New York, which explores religious meanings and institutions among internationalmigrants in Kuala Lumpur, London and Johannesburg.
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