Girish Daswani

Biography

Girish Daswani is a Social Anthropologist with a special interest in Ghana, the anthropology of religion, diaspora and transnationalism. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics in 2007. Dr. Daswani conducted multi-sited research with members of a Ghanaian Pentecostal church in southern Ghana and London (U.K.). In his work he looks at how Pentecostalism – its religious intermediaries, ideologies, and rituals – subjectively frames and facilitates church members ideas of religious transformation, Christian personhood, and aspirations for overseas travel. He looked at ‘transformation’ as a central theme in Pentecostal Christianity, as a moral and ethical framework for understanding individual and social change in southern Ghana and London. Transformation raises questions of continuity and discontinuity with the past, as expressed in concerns over ‘culture’ and identity, and the ways in which Pentecostal subjects become active agents in the world. While his specific interest is on different forms of Pentecostal expression in Ghana, and the migratory and missionary movement of members of the Church of Pentecost (CoP) from Ghana to London, he has also started research on certain key figures in Ghanaian social life and the perceived links between their acquisition of wealth and the moral evaluation of character.

Research Interest

Religious change, ritual, transnationalism and diaspora, politics of culture