About the Author

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Alok Kumar Kanungo is an associate research professor at IIT Gandhinagar and an adjunct associate professor at Flinders University. He was born in Odisha and grew up in close contact with many indigenous communities of eastern and north-eastern India. His early childhood experiences led him to eventually focus on archaeological and ethnographic studies of indigenous and ancient technology. For the last two and half decades, Dr. Kanungo has travelled and documented the rich heritage of the Nagas of northeast India, and the Bondos and Juangs of Odisha both in the field and in museums across Europe and the UK. He has worked in many areas where it is difficult to say where anthropology or history stops and archaeology begins. He has studied and published extensively on the subject of glass and glass-bead production and written or edited fifteen books and eighty research articles and book chapters. Prashant Kumar Singh is a post-doctoral fellow in the discipline of Humanities and Social Sciences, at IIT Gandhinagar. Dr. Singh has a Ph.D. in Anthropology (popular culture) from the University of Hyderabad. His research interests include anthropology of science (science studies), post-humanism, business anthropology and the larger question of 'self and civilizations' and their sustainability. He has published more than half a dozen research papers on the anthropology of self in peer-reviewed international and national journals.