Shantanu Nevrekar
Graduate Student Fellowship | 2024–2025 Academic Year
Banking on Community: Cooperative Credit, Caste, and Politics in India
Cooperatives are associations based on democracy and collective ownership, often seen as alternatives to state and market-based economic institutions like corporations. In India, cooperative banks and credit societies have been integral to state and non-state projects of development and financial inclusion, and have become firmly embedded in rural and small-town economies. Even when formally open to all, cooperatives in urban India have emerged as aligned with particular caste and class networks. Shantanu's research interrogates how cooperatives negotiate caste, occupation, and identity in contemporary India, offering a novel insight on the entanglements of community and financial markets.
Shantanu Nevrekar, Department of Anthropology
Shantanu Nevrekar is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Stanford University. His doctoral research is based on an ethnography of cooperative banks and credit societies in the state of Maharashtra in India, and explores how cooperatives negotiate caste, occupation, and identity in contemporary India. He is broadly interested in the study of community and economic life in India and seeks to use his insights towards helping strengthen and democratize grassroots initiatives of financial inclusion. His broader theoretical interests also include histories of capitalism and economic thought, colonialism and postcolonialism, anthropology of state and bureaucracy, and caste studies. Before coming to Stanford, he completed an MA in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and an M.Phil in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.