Sara Frumento

Research Interests

Sovereignty; elite agency; infrastructure; aesthetics; materiality; sensory politics; embodiment; political anthropology; South Asia; Indian Ocean; small states.

Sara is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, where she is completing her PhD with support from the Clarendon Scholarship, and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Her doctoral research draws on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka to examine how elites in small South Asian states navigate geopolitical asymmetries amid Sino-Indian competition. She develops the concept of 'hyper-agency' to show how external dependence is transformed into domestically legible and affectively resonant forms of sovereignty through infrastructure, land reclamation, heritage politics, and aesthetic practices, while also attending to how sovereignty is lived, sensed, and negotiated in everyday life.

During her Visiting Fellowship at Harvard, she is extending this research through an anthropological engagement with embodiment, atmosphere, and materiality as dimensions of sovereignty.