Aparna Rao (February 3, 1950 – June 28, 2005) was a German anthropologist who performed studies on social groups in Afghanistan, France, and some regions of India.

Rao's research focused on peripatetic, agrarian populations in Afghanistan, France, Jammu, Kashmir, and western Rajasthan.

[3] In 1980, she married Michael J. Casimir (*1942 in Berlin), an ethnologist who retired in 2020 as professor emeritus from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Cologne, Germany.

She spoke multiple languages including Bengali, English, French, German, Hindi, Persian, Romanes, and Urdu.

[9] She researched the economy, ethnicity, gender relations, and social organization of pastoralist and peripatetic peoples in Afghanistan, France, and Kashmir.

[14] In her research in Afghanistan, Rao identified the Jalali, Pikraj, Shadibaz and Vangawala peoples as four clans of "industrial nomads" who speak a north Indian dialect and have characteristics of gypsies.

[21][22] Asta Olesen suggested that in the book, Rao had filled "an almost complete gap in the knowledge of the ethnic puzzle of Afghanistan".

[22] Gropper suggested that her book The Other Nomads: Peripatetic Minorities in Cross–Cultural Perspective (1987) lacked structure and relevancy to future work.

In one of the essays, she analyzed research conducted on some Afghan nomadic people in 1975–1978, their self-perception, and how they were perceived by the sedentary populace of Afghanistan.

[24] According to Denison University's Bahram Tavakolian, the book clarified the understanding of how "environment, structure, and agency" interacted in nomadic cultures.