Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Sarah Saddler, "Performing Corporate Bodies: Multinational Theatre in Global India" (Routledge, 2025)
Description: How do corporations use theater to reconcile the crises of late capitalism? In our latest interview on Ethnographic Marginalia, we speak with Dr. Sarah Saddler about her new book Performing Corporate Bodies (Routledge, 2024), where she describes how corporations have borrowed techniques from activist theater to manage their workers in India and beyond. Sarah explains how she came to ethnographic techniques from a theater background, before discussing how she managed the challenges and misunderstandings caused by her identity as a western researcher. And finally, she describes how doing performance ethnography helped her understand how individuals play roles, not just in th...