Girish Daswani

Girish Daswani is a social-cultural anthropologist with a special interest in Ghana. For his first book Looking Back, Moving Forward: Transformation and Ethical Practice in the Ghanaian Church of Pentecost, Professor Daswani conducted multi-sited research with members of a Ghanaian Pentecostal church in southern Ghana and London. Focusing on Pentecostal Christianity as an ethical framework for understanding individual and social change, he looked at how Pentecostalism subjectively frames and facilitates church members ideas of religious transformation, personhood, and overseas travel. Professor Daswani’s current research examines how different segments of Ghanaian society are responding to escalating accusations of political and moral corruption: they include activists, artists, prophets, street traders and traditional priests. 

Teaching Interests

Culture, Politics and Globalization; The Anthropology of Transnationalism; Conceptualizing Religion

Research Interests

Religion, Diaspora and Transnationalism; Morality and Ethics; Activism and Corruption; Ghana

Selected Recent Publications

2023. Animating Irony: The Force of Irony in Online and Offline Political Movements. Public Culture 35(2). Co-authored with Farhan Samanani, Susannah Crockford, Daniel M. Knight, Craig Stensrud, Marc Tuters, and Io Chaviara.

2021. “God is Good”: Corruption and its Pentecostal Face in Ghana. (Japanese translation by Shin-ichiro Ishida and Masaharu Kawano). Jimbun Gakuho (The Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities), No. 517-2 (Social Anthropology 14): 35-50.

2020. On Cynicism: Activist and Artistic Responses to Corruption in Ghana. Cultural Anthropology 35 (1): 104-133.

2019. Ordinary Ethics and Its Temporalities: The Christian God and the 2016 Ghanaian Elections. Anthropological Theory 19(3): 323-340.

2018. “Ethics and morality, anthropological approaches to…” In Hilary Callan (Editor). The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. John Wiley and Sons Ltd.