Teaching Fellows

Eléonore Rimbault is a cultural anthropologist researching topics related to memory, oral history, intergenerational transmission, stigma, and labor. Her research since 2016 with retired and active circus professionals in South India traces the situated South Asian histories of this itinerant profession, and their entanglements with local caste and class contexts and dynamics. Her study of the circus traces the social life of cultural forms which appear to be continuously declining, eliciting nostalgia, conservation discourses, and efforts from social actors. By focusing on the issues raised by the circus’ visibility and itinerancy in Indian society, her current book project, Disappearance in the Ring: the Perpetual Unmaking of India’s Big Top Circuses, foregrounds the transformations of Indian publics since 1900. Through ethnographic work with circus stakeholders, complemented by visual methodologies, she follows these transformations with an emphasis on the development of media technologies, animal rights, the social status of children, and labor conditions.