Geographer, Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS)
A CNRS research fellow since 2001, Blandine Ripert is an ethno-geographer. Her research focuses on contemporary dynamics in Nepal and India, which she approaches from a spatial, social, cultural, political and religious point of view. She has taken a particular interest in the Christianization process of a Buddhist population group in central Nepal (among the western Tamangs, in Nuwakot, Dhading and Rasuwa districts), and in the impact of the globalization process on this rural population (PhD in geography obtained in 2000 at the Université Denis Diderot-Paris 7, under the supervision of Olivier Dollfus).
She has also worked on questions regarding the management and appropriation of natural environments and the transformation of landscapes in Nepal and in the Alps (Parc des Écrins), as well as on the effects of the dissemination of agricultural innovations in a context of agrarian and political transformations in central Nepal, but also on conflicts surrounding the appropriation of space (environmental policies in Nepal, and short-term fieldwork in north-eastern India in the vicinity of the Kaziranga National Park).
Her research has also addressed the dissemination and impact of new information and communication technologies in India (fieldwork in Tamil Nadu in the vicinity of Madurai as part of a post-doctoral fellowship in 2001/2002 at the Institut français de Pondichéry, then in Bombay in 2003 with ACI funding). More broadly speaking, Blandine Ripert is interested in localized cultural and religious transformations in a context of globalization, and she approaches these questions by studying acculturation processes.
She is currently interested in how politics are becoming ethnicized in Nepal, as well as in the identitarian assertions of minority groups (janajati) that are now claiming the “native” label. She will be posted in Kathmandu for two years starting in September 2015. In this new phase of fieldwork, she will be particularly concentrating on former villagers who have become urbanized, settling either in Kathmandu or in medium-sized cities such as Trishuli or Dhading Besi. Her aim is to better understand how this change in location modifies their practices and representations, especially from religious, identitarian and political perspectives, and how such changes in turn affect—or fail to affect—their home villages. The earthquakes that occurred in April 2015 will no doubt modify her area of study and intervention.
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