Unruly Hills

Unruly Hills PDF

Author: Bengt G. Karlsson

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2011-05-01

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0857451057

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The questions that inspired this study are central to contemporary research within environmental anthropology, political ecology, and environmental history: How does the introduction of a modern, capitalist, resource regime affect the livelihood of indigenous peoples? Can sustainable resource management be achieved in a situation of radical commodification> of land and other aspects of nature? Focusing on conflicts relating to forest management, mining, and land rights, the author offers an insightful account of present-day challenges for indigenous people to accommodate aspirations for ethnic sovereignty and development.

Jungle Passports

Jungle Passports PDF

Author: Malini Sur

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2021-08-06

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0812297768

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Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim "frontier peasants," "savage mountaineers," and Christian "ethnic minorities," suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of these people to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India's construction of one of the world's longest and most highly militarized border fences. Jungle Passports recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borders. Sur shows how the division of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. Paying close attention to the forces that shape the life-worlds of deportees, refugees, farmers, smugglers, migrants, bureaucrats, lawyers, clergy, and border troops, she reveals how reciprocity and kinship and the enforcement of state violence, illegality, and border infrastructures shape the margins of life and death. Combining years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, her thoughtful and evocative book is a poignant testament to the force of life in our era of closed borders, insularity, and "illegal migration."

Entangled Lives

Entangled Lives PDF

Author: Joy L. K. Pachuau

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-08-31

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1009276697

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This book considers three questions about understanding the past. How can we rethink human histories by including animals and plants? How can we overcome nationally territorialised narratives? And how can we balance academic history-writing and indigenous understandings of history? This is a tentative foray into the connections between these questions. Entangled Lives explore them for a large area that has seldom been explored in academic inquiry. The 'Eastern Himalayan Triangle' includes both uplands and lowlands. The region is the meeting point of three global biodiversity hotspots connecting India and China across Myanmar/Burma, Bangladesh and Bhutan. The 'Triangle' is treated as a multispecies site in which human histories have always been utterly intertwined with plant and animal histories. It foregrounds that history is co-created – it is always interspecies history – but that its contours are locally specific.

Communities, Institutions and Histories of India’s Northeast

Communities, Institutions and Histories of India’s Northeast PDF

Author: Charisma K. Lepcha

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1000506525

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People from India’s Northeast have crafted distinct as well as diverse cultural cryptograms, discernments and personality which is frequently at loggerheads with the power politics from outside the region. Thus, attention is often on the societies of the Northeast India as they putter with transforming institutions and more intensive resource consumption in the wake of modernization and development activities. This volume is an examination into questions of who exercises control, who constructs knowledge/ideas about the region and how far such discourses are people-centric. It inspects how India’s Northeast have been understood in colonial and post-colonial contexts through the contributions from research scholars and faculties from different academic spaces. These contributions are both from within the region as well as from neighbourhood. Thus, presenting a cross-dimensional gaze on social, political, economic as well as issues related to space-relation. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Mining, Displacement, and Matriliny in Meghalaya

Mining, Displacement, and Matriliny in Meghalaya PDF

Author: Bitopi Dutta

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-03-03

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1000552632

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This book studies how Development-Induced Displacement (DID) radically restructures gender relations in indigenous tribal societies. Through an indepth case study of the Indian state of Meghalaya, one of the few matrilineal societies of the world, it analyses how people cope with conflicts in their perception of self, family, and society brought on by the transition from traditional modes of living to increased urbanisation, and how these experiences are different for men and women. It looks at the ways in which this gendered change is experienced inter-generationally in different contexts of people’s lives, including work and leisure activities. The book also investigates people’s attitudes towards matrilineal structures and their perception of change on matriliny where mining has played a role in building their view of their matrilineal tradition. Drawing on extensive interviews with individuals directly affected by this phenomenon, the book, part of the Transition in Northeastern India series, makes a significant contribution to the study of DID. It will be useful for scholars and researchers of urbanisation, gender studies, Northeast India studies, development studies, minority studies, public policy, political studies, and sociology.

Accumulation and Dispossession

Accumulation and Dispossession PDF

Author: Asok Kumar Ray

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-06-07

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 104003487X

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This book sketches a road map of privatisation, accumulation and dispossession of communal land in the tribal areas of North East India from pre-colonial times to the neo-liberal era. Spread over five chapters, this study unfolds the privatisation of communal land in the backdrop of a larger theoretical and historical canvas. It deals with the different institutional modes of privatisation, accumulation and dispossession of communal land, the changes in land use and cropping patterns, the changes in land relations and the land-based identity of the tribal community as a result. The conclusive chapter makes a broader reflection of the grand narrative of privatisation, accumulation and dispossession of communal land in North East India. This title is co-published with Aakar Books. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

Adventures in Aidland

Adventures in Aidland PDF

Author: David Mosse

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2011-04-30

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780857451118

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Anthropological interest in new subjects of research and contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to a wide ranging variety of professional fields. Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development's discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant attention to knowledge producers themselves, despite anthropologists being among them. This is the focus of this volume. It concerns the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction but is equally interested in the social life of development professionals, in the capacity of ideas to mediate relationships, in networks of experts and communities of aid workers, and in the dilemmas of maintaining professional identities. Going well beyond obsolete debates about 'pure' and 'applied' anthropology, the book examines the transformations that occur as social scientific concepts and practices cross and re-cross the boundary between anthropological and policy making knowledge.

The Land Question in India

The Land Question in India PDF

Author: Anthony P. D'Costa

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-03-31

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0192510916

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This volume takes a fresh look at the land question in India. Instead of re-engaging in the rich transition debate in which the transformation of agriculture is seen as a necessary historical step to usher in dynamic capitalist (or socialist) development, this collection critically examines the centrality of land in contemporary development discourse in India. Consequently, the focus is on the role of the state in pushing a process of dispossession of peasants through direct expropriation for developmental purposes such as acquisition of land by (local) states for infrastructure development and to support accumulation strategies of private business through industrialization. Land in India is sought for non-agricultural purposes such as purchasing land to reduce risk and real estate development. Land is also central to tribal communities (adivasis), whose livelihoods depend on it and on a moral economy that is independent of any price-driven markets. Adivasis tend to hold on to such property, not as individual owners for profit, but for collective security and to protect a way of life. Thus land, notwithstanding its role in the accumulation process, has been, and continues to be, a turbulent arena in which classes, castes, and communities are in conflict with each other, with the state, and with capital, jockeying to determine the terms and conditions of land transactions or their prevention, through both market and non-market mechanisms. The volume goes beyond the traditional political economy of the agrarian transition question, and deals with, inter alia, distributional conflicts arising from acquisition of land by the state for capital accumulation on the one hand and its commodification on the other. It provides new analytical insights into the land acquisition processes, their legal-institutional and ethical implications, and the multifaceted regional diversity of acquisition experiences in India.