User Memberships:

Ph.D. 1988, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley

M.A. 1984, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley

B.A.  1982 (Phi Beta Kappa), Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

Books:

Tantra and Technology: Practicing Wonder in Daily Life (Eat, Walk, Love, See). Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 2023.

Sociology of Well-Being: Lessons from India. New Delhi: Sage, 2017. (Reissued by Atlantic Books, New Delhi, 2025.)

Globalization on the Ground: Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India. New Delhi: Sage, 2008.

Movies, Masculinity, and Modernity: An Ethnography of Men’s Filmgoing in India. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Culture in Action: Family Life, Emotion, and Male Dominance in Banaras, India.  Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.

Book Manuscript:

Strange Methods, Strange Teaching, Strange Experiences: The Liberating Power of the Strange. First, this book advocates and explores strange methodologies – introspection, interactive introspection, documentary analysis, and fieldwork – that reveal complexities, processes, and meanings of social life. Second, this book advocates and explores strange teaching that involves students sharing community and research projects with themselves and the teacher to understand ourselves and our shared world. Third, this book illustrates the contributions of these techniques by exploring what communities in the classroom have learned about strange experiences – that is, the experience of other energies, spirits, and consciousnesses that seem to rush through us without our own intention, connecting us to a sense of really real realities that are experienced as different from ordinary realities. Strange experiences – the woman who learns her mother called her at the moment as she was experiencing a crisis because a picture of the daughter had fallen off a wall; the dead bird that appears in the seat of the car the morning after a psychic said her grandmother would appear as a bird; all the lights changing green as you race to a hospital – are meaningful, transformative and connect us to love energy which our world needs now more than ever. Opening ourselves up to experiencing and recognizing the strange can change everything.  The book is grounded in Asian thought about the strange and considers how recognizing the strange shows the way for a sensual sociology grounded in sensual understanding.