Carter, Lionel

Lionel Caplan was born in Montreal in November, 1931 and attended schools in the same city before entering McGill University, where he completed a BCom degree in 1952. After a spell in the commercial world he returned to academic life, choosing the discipline of Social Anthropology, and completed MA and PhD degrees at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He joined the SOAS staff in 1965 as a Lecturer, was promoted to Reader in 1975 and to Professor in 1987, retiring in 1997.

Caplan’s research focused largely on the complex politico-cultural encounters between dominant and dominated sectors of society in diverse South Asian settings. In 1964-65, as part of his doctoral programme, he examined the relations between a marginalised tribal population in east Nepal and members of high Hindu castes who had entered their territory and taken control of their land. The thesis and subsequent book which emerged from this research placed the study of conflict over land at the centre of anthropological understanding of tribal peoples in South Asia. In 1969 he returned to Nepal, this time to the western hills to conduct a study of the links between a small administrative centre and its rural hinterland, paying special attention to the ways in which a largely disenfranchised local population seeks to engage with the representatives of central power in their midst.

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