Thomas Blom Hansen teaches anthropology at Yale University. Currently he is finishing a book on freedom and its anxieties in a postapartheid South African township. His publications include The Saffron Wave: Hindu Nationalism and Democracy in Modern India (1999) and Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (2001). He has coedited two volumes with Finn Stepputat: States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (2001) and Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World (2005).