Anthropology

Radhika Moral is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Brown University. Her research examines agrarian and ecological change in silk-farming (sericulture) communities in Assam and Northeast India. Bringing together ethnographic and archival research, she situates contemporary efforts to sustainably scale up silk production within longer histories of plantation economies in the region. She traces how sericulture, often framed as an artisanal or “heritage” practice, has been shaped by colonial and postcolonial plantation regimes, land tenure policies, and extractive commodity logics. By placing current sustainability and expansion experiments in dialogue with histories of plantation and land transformation in Assam, her work examines how efforts to scale silk production encounter ecological change and historically sedimented land relations, revealing the limits of plantation-derived models of expansion.