Bengt G. Karlsson

Stockholm University | SU · Department of Social Anthropology

The cultivation of tea has had major impact on societies and environments across the world. It has been the cause of imperial wars, colonial appropriations of territories and capitalist exploitation of people and ecologies. In this article, I am particularly concerned with the British empire of tea, what preceded it and its afterlife in the former...

Cambridge Core - Social and Cultural Anthropology - Leaving the Land - by Dolly Kikon

In a recruitment centre in Dimapur, Nagaland, indigenous youth are trained for employment as service personnel in luxury hotels, restaurants and airlines. Most of them are unemployed, seeking new future prospects outside the region and the harsh existence of subsistence agriculture. English language skills, a general cosmopolitan outlook and their...

In a recruitment centre in Dimapur, Nagaland, indigenous youth are trained for employment as service personnel in luxury hotels, restaurants and airlines. Most of them are unemployed, seeking new future prospects outside the region and the harsh existence of subsistence agriculture. English language skills, a general cosmopolitan outlook and their...

This book review article probes present anthropological engagement with the environment through the prism of political ecology, placing political ecology in conversation with newer work in environmnetal anthropology. In situating this conversation, the reviewer draws on four recent anthropological monographs that, in one way or another, deal with a...

Geographies of difference brings together new research on Northeast India focusing on key socio-political and historical processes that make the area what it is today. Following recent major reconfigurations of ‘area studies’ in South and Southeast Asia, ‘geographies’ in the title highlights our approach to Northeast India as an emerging ‘geo-histo...

ABSTRACT In the last decade, large numbers of indigenous youth from the uplands of Northeast India have migrated to metropolitan cities across the country. Many end up in the new service sector, getting jobs in high-end restaurants, shopping malls and spas. The demand for their labour is due to their un-Indian ‘exotic Asian’ appearance and a reputa...

In this article, I seek to bring together a number of environmental histories to think about the place of forest in our lives. It is partly autobiographical in the sense that it concerns forest issues that I, for various reasons, have been entangled with recently. These are the making of carbon (REDD+) forests in Northeast India, preservation of th...

Political ecology is a transdisciplinary research field addressing nature – society interrelations, often with a focus on contentions and struggles over land and natural resources. Power asymmetries and social inequalities are critical points of departure, and many scholars in the field pursue a kind of emancipatory engagement with subalterns or ma...

This introduction presents the context and theoretical basis of fluidity of attachments in Northeast India. A large cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity, an international border situation, and various forms of unsettled relations with ‘mainstream India’ characterize Northeast India. These aspects form the frame of highly dynamic movements of...

In this article I examine the ways in which the term “indigenous peoples” is reworked in a specific South Asian context. I focus on the new, hybrid category of “indigenous tribe” in the Indian state of Meghalaya. I argue that we can think of the indigenous tribe category as a strategic conflation of two different regimes of rights or political asse...

Development professionals spend a lot of time writing and the aid industry has a vast production of texts. The author argues here that anthropology of development needs to look anew at how these texts are being produced, circulated and the purposes they serve. I have briefly identified six features of development writing: 1. Institutional ownership...

This article discusses ethnicity and the state in Northeast India from the vantage point of James Scott's influential works, especially his recent book The Art of Not Being Governed. Scott has over the years explored different aspects of peasant or subaltern modes of opposing dominance. The overall insistence is on the resistance and agency of the...

Unruly Hills is one of the most original and provocative books on environment and politics in India. Communities supposedly control most land, forests, and other natural resources in the hills of Northeast India. However capitalist transformations have rendered those hill communities quite powerless: they are hardly able to control the local resour...

India's nuclear programme has suffered from a shortage of uranium. As elsewhere in the world, the main uranium deposits are located on lands belonging to indigenous or tribal peoples. This paper discusses the unfolding controversy relating to uranium mining in the West Khasi Hills of Meghalaya. The government-owned Uranium Corporation of India has...

Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets, and Community among. Migrant Pastoral People. Arun Agrawal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. ix. 219 pp., tables, figures, maps, notes, bibliography, index.

This article examines the present mobilization of indigenous peoples in India and their assertions of indigeneity at the United Nations. The notion of ‘indigenous peoples’ is highly controversial in India, and both the government and leading social scientists/anthropologists claim that it is neither possible nor desirable to single out any such cat...

This paper deals with a number of questions relating to politics based on “ethnicity” or community belonging among “tribal” or indigenous peoples in India's northeastern region. In particular, I probe the complex question of indigenous peoples’ right to self‐determination, a right that most indigenous organizations in the world regard as crucial an...