Maura Finkelstein is a writer, ethnographer, and former associate professor of anthropology. She is the author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, published by Duke University Press in 2019. Her writing has also been published in Anthological Quarterly, City and Society, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Now, Post45, Electric Literature, Allegra Lab, Red Pepper Magazine, The Markaz Review, the Scottish Left Review, Mondoweiss, and Al Jazeera.

She recently visited CSAS to deliver a talk that expanded on the ideas in her book, The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, which explores everyday life and work at the last privately owned textile mill. 

How did you get into South Asian studies, and what led you to the topic of your book, The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai? 

MF: My best friend growing up was from Calcutta, so as a kid, I spent a lot of time in her Bengali household, and she spent a lot of time in my Jewish one – we were fascinated by each other's worlds. When I was an undergraduate deciding where to study abroad, India felt so much like a part of my childhood imagination and was a place I really wanted to spend time in, so I spent a semester in north India. I eventually got a master's degree in anthropology, in which I focused on South Asian history. I knew I wanted to focus on India when I started my PhD program, and my friend’s parents recommended I spend my first summer with them in Mumbai. They were living in a building that had been a textile mill redeveloped as an apartment complex, and so I was accidentally in the mill lands. Initially, I wanted to spend all my time in Bandra and the suburbs where my friends lived, and I was always trying to leave central Mumbai. I realized after a week that I was being a bad anthropologist, not asking the people in my own neighborhood what was happening. I was a little bit motivated by shame, but I also developed a fascination with the question of why I couldn’t see what was going on in this neighborhood and why my attention was constantly drawn elsewhere. I realized that I was moving through the city in a way where I could not see the mill lands, even though I was in them every day. 

In the lecture you gave at CSAS, you mentioned that your interest has shifted to Palestine in recent years. How do you see that as connected to your background in South Asian studies and your work studying Mumbai’s mills? 

MF: My investment in Palestine emerged around the same time that my interest in India was developing in high school. My investment in Palestine has always been marked by a horror at the way the zionist narrative controls everything in the United States, and I have felt so incredibly devastated at seeing that erasure. As I was training as an anthropologist, doing fieldwork in Mumbai, my methodological training situated me in such a way that my investment was with working-class communities in Mumbai who felt like they had been written out of the history of the city and rendered anachronistic. My work as an anthropologist thinking about the construction of meta narratives and what they erase impacts everything that I do, including, of course, Palestine. Certain forms of erasure are constantly happening in relation to our understanding of history. My interest in South Asia and in Palestine are linked via my investment in privileging certain perspectives that are more liberatory and that are deemed contradictory or threatening. 

Also, as an American living in the United States, a very zionist country, and also witnessing the rise of Hindutva politics while in India, I really clarified the connection between the American empire, Zionism, and Hindutva, and the supremacy of Islamophobia in all cases. 

How did you find Ann Arbor? 

MF: It was my first time in Ann Arbor. There is so much going on here that it felt too short of a trip. It was very interesting to be in Michigan right before the election and to consider how Michigan has played into electoral politics and the clearly disinterested abandonment of the democratic elite going into the election, so that felt very central. Overall, I had such a good experience and engaged with such curious and generous communities in all the spaces I entered. 

What are you up to now? 

MF: I am trying to write a book about Hillel International, intending to uncover it as a Zionist organization and not the center of Jewish life that it claims to be. I’m also getting the opportunity to go to a lot of campuses, which is wonderful in terms of being able to connect with people but difficult because the reason behind all of it is the United State's funding of genocide and the repression of academic freedom. 

MF: Recently, my days begin and end with Palestine. I take a lot of comfort in connecting with students, faculty, and staff who understand that we are funding a genocide and that Palestinians are being annihilated every day, and that we are watching it on our phones. I think it has been wild, as someone who has been involved in this movement for decades, to see Palestine become so central in so many peoples’ lives and politics.