Erik de Maaker (Ph.D., Leiden University, 2006) is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. His research centers on the social constitution of values, objects, and places, and their relevance in terms of ethnicity, indigeneity, heritage, environment, and religion, with a primary focus on upland regions of South and Southeast Asia. Currently, his research explores how heritage appreciation can shape notions of sustainability in both local and globalized contexts. Dr. de Maaker is the Principal Investigator of the Dutch National Research Council (NWO)-funded project, Futuring Heritage: Conservation, Community and Contestation in the Eastern Himalayas.
He is the author of the monograph Reworking Culture: Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in Garo Hills, North-East India (OUP, 2022) and has co-edited several volumes, including Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability (Routledge, 2021), Audiovisual and Digital Ethnography: A Practical and Theoretical Guide (Routledge, 2021), and Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia (Routledge, 2019). A prolific contributor to journals such as Asian Ethnography, South Asia, Visual Anthropology, and the Journal of Borderland Studies, he is also an award-winning visual anthropologist.
Radhika Gupta is a sociocultural anthropologist with a DPhil from Oxford University (2011). She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and the Centre for Modern Indian Studies in Göttingen, Germany. With 17 years in academia and 7 years in international development, her research interests span borderland studies, state-citizen relations, the anthropology of Islam, heritage, diversity and social inclusion, and environmental humanities.
Dr. Gupta is the Principal Investigator for the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant-funded project, Entangled Universals of Transnational Islamic Charity (2024-2029). Her first book, Freedom in Captivity: Negotiations of Belonging along Kashmir’s Frontier, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. She currently coordinates the Asia Research Cluster at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology.