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Are the Central Himalayas in Zomia? Some scholarly and political considerations across time and space
Abstract
This article examines the applicability of the Zomia concept for social scientific studies of the Himalayan region, with a focus on the Central Himalayas. While for both empirical and political reasons the term Zomia itself may not be entirely appropriate to the Himalayan Massif, the analytical imperatives that underlie James C. Scott particularly the emphasis on the ethnic, national, and religious fluidity of highland communities, and their intentionality and agency vis- can be of great utility to those working in the Himalayan region. Through a historical review of the area tradition of , as well as an ethnographic sketch of the cross-border Thangmi community of Nepal, India, and China traditional nation-state rubrics.
... To understand the anti-dam resistance in Lachung and Lachen, it is necessary to comprehend the historical, political, cultural and economic context that determines individual or collective routes to protest. Schendel's work on "Zomia" [36] or Shneiderman's on the "Himalayan Massif" [37] both describe the Himalayan region as an invisible, transnational area, " . . . marked by a sparse population, historical isolation . . . ...
... 187). Before notions of nation-state crafted definite geo-political borders in the so-called Himalayan Zomia or Massif (encompassing Nepal, Bhutan, Indian States of Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh, and China including the Tibetan Autonomous Region [37]), these regions, more than being "boundary, border", were like "a zip-per" stitching together various "densely textured cultural fabrics" [39] (p. 2). ...
... This explains why "society here is a constellation of multiple identities" [40] (p. 1), resulting from diverse as well as entangled "geographical, linguistic, racial, national, cultural and religious mixtures, commonalities, fluidity with neighboring" regions [37] (p. 290). ...
In India’s Eastern Himalayan State of Sikkim, the indigenous Bhutia communities, Lachungpas and Lachenpas, successfully contested all proposed hydropower projects and have managed to sustain an anti-dam opposition in their home regions, Lachung and Lachen. In this paper, we discuss this remarkable, un-researched, effective collective action against hydropower development, examining how identity and territory influence collective action through production, creation and application of vernacular knowledge systems. The role of the Dzumsa, a prevailing traditional system of self-governance among the Lachungpas and Lachenpas, has been central in their collective resistance against large dams in Lachung and Lachen. Our findings show that contrary to popular imageries, the Dzumsa is neither an egalitarian nor a democratic institution—rather, it is an exercise of an “agonistic unity”. The Dzumsas operate as complex collectives, which serve to politicize identity, decision-making and place-based territoriality in their struggle against internal and external threats. Principles of a “vernacular statecraft” helped bringing the local communities together in imperfect unions to oppose modernist designs of hydropower development. However, while such vernacular institutions were able to construct a powerful local adversary to neoliberal agendas, they also pose high social, political and emotional risks to the few within the community, who chose not to align with the normative principles of the collective.
... The hill slopes, once cleared of forest, are called sainda -a term that denotes both the land itself and the labour of shifting cultivation that is undertaken here. This is not the classical "Indian village" of ethnographic lore -understood in the literature as a caste-divided sociological unit (Mayer 1960(Mayer , 1966Srinivas 1980); neither is this the archetypal highland of a stateless tribe, or zomia, though comparisons do emerge (Scott 2009;Shneiderman 2010;Vitebsky 2017b: 20 and enni (black lentils). The resources of the surrounding forest provided an abundance of various fruits such as īṭapanḍu (tamarind), panasapanḍu (jackfruit) and markai (mango), green leafy vegetables such as bhēnda kusīr (sorrel leaves) and kodel kusīr (wild spinach), nutritious roots like padmarṭe and kerismarṭe, and materials for constructing houses including tungwoḍmara (teak), veddūr (bamboo) and tarḍāku (palm leaves) for thatching roofs. ...
This thesis investigates indigenous adivasi experiences of livelihood transitions and policies of affirmative action in the Southeast Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with people from across the Koya adivasi group, this research shows how the benefits of affirmative action policies filter unevenly through communities and households. Koyas are categorised by the Indian government as a Scheduled Tribe (ST), and on this basis are eligible for affirmative action measures such as land protections, subsidised grain, and reserved seats in schools and state employment. Unequal access to such policies, which are broadly intended to integrate adivasis into the regional economy and society, exacerbates class distinctions within the Koya community. Through the process of transition away from small-scale shifting cultivation towards greater dependency on the state, Koyas’ sense of having a “distinctive culture” is reified, as their inclusion is premised on the reiteration of their “backwardness”. The thesis charts an objectification of community identity as the logic of state recognition becomes intertwined with emic understandings of cultural differences and affinities. To investigate these processes the thesis moves through ethnography at various scales of social life: the household, the village, and the wider region. By exploring how interlocutors differentiate themselves from others within these spaces, I show how particular notions of ethnic, gendered and generational difference are produced, experienced and reiterated, through social reproduction, social interactions, and engagement with state discourses. This argument is grounded in fine-grained ethnography of social relations and informed by a historical perspective on entrenched forms of ethnic, and caste/tribe difference in South Asia. The empirical material stretches from the differences in aspirations between siblings and closely related families within a village of shifting cultivators, to the differences felt to be deeply ingrained between caste and tribe communities across the wider region.
... The Himalayan region, constituted by the states of Nepal, Bhutan, India and China, is a product of the colonial project of controlling bodies and spaces, through articulations of borders and identities (Gellner 2013;Shneiderman 2010Shneiderman , 2016Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin 2011;Smith 2012;Mathur 2015a, b;Smith and Gergan 2015). Tropes of remoteness and formidable frontier lands established on such colonial imaginations have also colluded with hegemonic transnational politics of resource use and sustainable development, to produce a discourse propagating ecological deterioration and exceptional precarity (Guthman 1997;Ives 2004;Mathur 2015b). ...
... Until the nineteenth century, Nepal's Hindu state had a strong political control over its hill populations (Shneiderman 2010) reflected in complex and extractive land rights and taxation systems that evolved over time (Regmi 1977). Grounded on a caste system that endures despite being abolished in 1963, social differentiation between high and low castes, caste and non-caste people, and distinctions between higher status hill people and lower status terai (plains) people still affect livelihood opportunities. ...
We provide an analytical contrast of the dynamics of secondary forest regeneration in Nepal and Peru framed by a set of common themes: land access, boundaries, territories, and rights, seemingly more secure in Nepal than Peru; processes of agrarian change and their consequences for forest-agriculture interactions and the role of secondary forest in the landscape, more marked in Peru, where San Martín is experiencing apparent agricultural intensification, than in Nepal; and finally processes of social differentiation that have consequences for different social groups, livelihood construction and their engagement with trees, common to both countries. These themes address the broader issue of the necessary conditions for secondary forest regeneration and the extent to which the rights and livelihood benefits of those actively managing it are secured.
... During the early seventeenth century, few Drukpa Lamas from Tibet came as politico-religious 'refugees' to the Eastern Himalayas -Sikkim and Bhutan (Dixit, 1992a;Joseph C, 1997). The Gelugpa sect of the Mahayana Buddhism then ruled Tibet in an 'authoritarian' (Shneiderman, 2010) way against other sects, as a consequence, a section of Kagyupa Drukpa Lamas fled from Tibet (Phuntsho, 2013). After they arrived in the Eastern Himalayas, they enthroned Penchu Namgyal as the ruler in 1614 (Subba, 1992). ...
Scholarly discourses involving the peripheral regions often look through the binary lenses of ‘identity’ and ‘development’, which are then ascribed as the root causes, leading to the emergence of political movements in these regions. Analogies emanating from such visions entrapped solely on development deficit fall short in dealing with the interplay and intersections of history, geography and politics related to such regions. The analysis concerning the Gorkhaland Movement also seems to be trapped within such an explanatory binary of ‘identity’ and ‘development’. This article attempts to situate the hills of Darjeeling, where the movement is located, into a less discussed framework of geopolitics that not only politicizes the geographies of the Eastern Himalayas but also historicizes the communities and their aspirations as a response to the manoeuvrings by the concerned states. Within such a framework, we shall also discuss how the colonial geopolitics of migration, henceforth, has been succinctly carried forward by the post-colonial state in shaping its notions related to the hills of Darjeeling.
... Some characteristics of Zomia apply to the Himalayas, too (Shneiderman, 2010): there, too, fluidity with regard to ethnic and political identities has been noted (see Turin, 2003Turin, , 2014 for aspects of shifting linguistic allegiances and its relation to ethnicity), and "rugged topography has throughout history weakened the assimilating and centralizing tendencies of large states, and allowed for the existence of small, isolated communities living with a high degree of economic self-sufficiency and political autonomy" (Owen- Smith & Hill, 2014:1). Given the east-west orientation of the Himalayan range and its steep slope, most river valleys, which are deeply incised, have an orthogonal north-south orientation, significantly reducing the possibilities of transversal communication and contact but fostering contact along their course (Post, 2013(Post, , 2015. ...
Language use in mountainous areas often exhibits special social dynamics. This contribution sketches some of the most salient patterns of language use in upland Southeast Asia ,the greater Himalayas, the Caucasus, the Central Andes, the New Guinea highlands, and touches upon the Alps and some highland areas of Africa and North America. Accumulated over long time, such patterns of use yield particular—often highly diverse, fragmented, and discontinuous—distributions of languages and language families in geographical space the precise characteristics of which also depend on prevailing local sociolinguistic and socioeconomic conditions. Generalization are still difficult since most observations are anecdotal rather than systematic: as far as language structure is concerned, languages spoken in mountainous regions are traditionally often attributed a “conservative” or “archaic” character, preserving inherited traits and patterns that are lost elsewhere; the inaccessibility of the terrain and the resulting relative social isolation are commonly invoked to explain this situation. More recently, mountain languages have also been claimed to feature peaks in the distribution of some typological properties, whether due to sociogeographical factors or, more controversially, even direct influences of the environment: ejectives, grammatical encoding of elevational or topographic information, and overall high levels of structural complexity.
... With India looming large, looking outward from its borderlands allows new insights in the study of nation-state power, the 'idea' of the state, and the often contradictory and generally ambivalent character of borderland citizenship and belonging. Sara Shneiderman (2010) suggests that Scott's notion of political intentionality is relevant across the Central Himalayas, which Scott oddly excludes from van Schendel's original, much larger geography of Zomia. Here, Shneiderman posits a 'Himalayan Massif' as a productive comparative counterpoint to the 'Southeast Asian Massif' (coined by Jean Michaud in 1997) where Scott's Zomia resides. ...
This is an introduction both of the first issue, and to The Highlander: Journal of Highland Asia itself, setting out the genealogy of ideas, debates and critiques, principally around the concept 'Zomia', that have fostered significant debate and provided the impetus for this project. It is also a call for contributions toward fostering discussion, from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, that elucidate the similarities and differences, generalities and particularities of the myriad histories, languages, cultures, politics, and religions of primarily ethnic minorities living in the upland terrains linking Nepal and the Tibetan plateau with Northeast India, the Pamirs, Western China, and the highland communities of Southeast Asia – a vast, congruous region sometimes referred to as ‘Zomia', or indeed 'Zomia+'
... The Himalayan region, constituted by the states of Nepal, Bhutan, India and China, is a product of the colonial project of controlling bodies and spaces, through articulations of borders and identities (Gellner 2013;Shneiderman 2010Shneiderman , 2016Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin 2011;Smith 2012;Mathur 2015a, b;Smith and Gergan 2015). Tropes of remoteness and formidable frontier lands established on such colonial imaginations have also colluded with hegemonic transnational politics of resource use and sustainable development, to produce a discourse propagating ecological deterioration and exceptional precarity (Guthman 1997;Ives 2004;Mathur 2015b). ...
Vulnerability assessments are critical tools when exploring the Human Dimensions of Climate Change in the Global South. Additionally, Social Ecological Systems research utilizes such assessments to describe and predict potential spaces/tools of policy intervention. However, much of the assessment methodology fails to address the coupled structural processes underlying vulnerability and the experience of climate change. First, most scholarship does not operationalize mixed-methods research using plural epistemologies. Second, it fails to incorporate the communally produced knowledge of marginalized regional populations. Ultimately, power inequalities and their impact on vulnerability within complex adaptive systems, are overwhelmingly ignored. This project attempts to address these issues through a ‘Relational Vulnerability Analytic’ (RVA). We utilize a plural epistemological approach to construct an analytic that envisions the various relationships, processes and tools that need to be cultivated and managed in order to empower the community as co-producers of knowledge, while challenging the disciplinary bias in explorations of climate change risk and adaptation. Our method brings top-down spatial analysis tools, mathematical models, grounded ethnographic fieldwork and participatory feminist epistemologies into productive tension to reveal the sources of vulnerability and the agency of subjects, in rural Himalayan households. Additionally, we addresses the appeal for long term, collaborative, multi-dimensional research mobilization in the Himalayas. While the analytic is parameterized for the Himalayan region, it can be implemented in other regions with certain salient customizations. The project concludes that future efforts should be to operationalize this analytic for different regions and populations.
... For example, while unique Tawang geographical imaginaries of the eastern Himalaya politicize ethnic identity in Arunachal Pradesh (Gohain 2013) and longstanding mobile practices shape distinct socio-cultural relations in the western Himalayan areas of Ladakh (Rizvi 2004), both Arunachalis and Ladakhis share and recognize a common trans-Himalayan cultural ground. An example of ethnic identification that crosses international borders, and especially with respect to communities inhabiting the mountain landscapes of High Asia (Shneiderman 2010;Megoran 2006), members of Arunachali, Ladakhi, Dolpopa, and Lo-ba ethnic groups are also in many ways culturally (but not necessarily politically) Tibetan. Resonating with popular tropes that identify Ladakh as "Little Tibet," ...
This dissertation examines infrastructure development between Nepal and China to argue that
infrastructure is a symbol of national development imaginaries, a process and practice of state
making, and a vector for the spatial operations of geopolitical power. Starting with the
construction of a small trans-border road in Nepal’s northern district of Mustang, I examine how
a local infrastructure project has evolved into and been incorporated within larger, international
transportation networks, border regimes, trade and tax policies, and humanitarian programs. In
making this analysis, I introduce the concept of border corridors to examine how highways,
fences, bureaucracies, and aid are interwoven infrastructural components that build upon one
another in scalar and fractal ways in the production of larger infrastructure systems. Utilizing the
dialectical lenses of mobility and containment to see how infrastructure development in Mustang
constitutes new forms of border corridors, I argue that shifting configurations of trade networks
and sovereign rule have (re)shaped social relations across the region that are in turn expressed
through unique but oscillating geographical imaginaries. As fractal constructions and relational
processes that augment, redirect, and replace one another, I also show that infrastructures are not
things with definitive edges, beginnings, or endings but, rather, interdependent pieces of broader
and more complex material configurations. In order to see the state by looking at the borderlands,
I also examine infrastructures as material processes that undergird state formation and illustrate
how cultural practices and geopolitical interests converge in material and territorial ways through
the production of roads, borders, commodity circulations, and humanitarian aid. Unraveling the
entanglements of these infrastructural systems, I show how infrastructures intersect and refract
one another across trans-Himalayan spaces and, in so doing, reconfigure relationships between
states and citizens. Particularly in the context of greater Chinese interventions in South Asia and
possible future trajectories of Beijing’s One Belt One Road Initiative, I argue that infrastructure
development in Nepal presents a valuable case with which to understand the linkages between
broad international processes of South-South development and local community level
experiences with changing subject positions and social stratification.
... Popularized by James Scott (2009) as a distinctly non-state and anarchist space of upland Southeast Asia and re-envisioned by Jean Michaud (2010) as a Southeast Asian Massif that can be extended across the Tibetan Plateau, this article acknowledges but does not extensively engage with the arguments posed both for and against the utility of this inter-area heuristic. While much attention to and literature on Zomia is attentive to the ways in which borderland populations evade the state and remain illegible to central forces of control, this paper instead follows Shneiderman's (2010) intervention and maintains a sensibility of 'Zomia-thinking.' That is, rather than focusing on the political possibilities that exist in non-state spaces across the trans-Himalaya as other Zomia-work has done, I instead follow Shneiderman's previous arguments in this journal (2013) to see Mustang as a "multiple-state space" and, in so doing, examine the very real and important ways in which states, their borders, and citizenship identities are both lived and politicized across the Himalayan borderlands (Harris, 2013). ...
... To operationalize this framework and situate it within relational scholarship about the Himalayan region, I turn to Shneiderman's (2015) considerations on the 'production of regionality' in (Shneiderman, 2010). This relational vantage point challenges the place based and institutionally formal 'bounding' of the village as a sedentary administrative communal unit, framed in opposition to mobile, cosmopolitan cities (Bell & Osti, 2010;Gallo, 2015). ...
mobility, masculinity, himalayas, vulnerability, migration, uttarakhand
... The Himalayan region, constituted by the states of Nepal, Bhutan, India and China, is a product of the colonial project of controlling bodies and spaces, through articulations of borders and identities (Gellner 2013;Shneiderman 2010Shneiderman , 2016Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin 2011;Smith 2012;Mathur 2015a, b;Smith and Gergan 2015). Tropes of remoteness and formidable frontier lands established on such colonial imaginations have also colluded with hegemonic transnational politics of resource use and sustainable development, to produce a discourse propagating ecological deterioration and exceptional precarity (Guthman 1997;Ives 2004;Mathur 2015b). ...
Vulnerability assessments are critical tools when exploring the Human Dimensions of Climate Change in the Global South. Additionally, Social Ecological Systems research utilizes such assessments to describe and predict potential spaces/tools of policy intervention. However, much of the assessment methodology fails to address the coupled structural processes underlying vulnerability and the experience of climate change. First, most scholarship does not operationalize mixed-methods research using plural epistemologies. Second, it fails to incorporate the communally produced knowledge of marginalized regional populations. Ultimately, power inequalities and their impact on vulnerability, within complex adaptive systems, are overwhelmingly ignored. This project attempts to address these issues through ‘Relational Vulnerability Analytic’ (RVA). We utilize a socionatural approach to construct an analytic that envisions the various relationships, processes and tools that need to be cultivated and managed in order to empower the community as co-producers of knowledge, while challenging the disciplinary bias in explorations of climate change risk and adaptation. Our method brings top-down spatial analysis tools, mathematical models, grounded ethnographic fieldwork and participatory feminist epistemologies into productive tension to reveal the sources of vulnerability in rural Himalayan households. Additionally, we addresses the appeal for long term, collaborative, multi-dimensional research mobilization in the Himalayas. While the analytic is parameterized for the Himalayan region, it can be implemented in other regions with certain salient customizations. The project concludes that future efforts should be to operationalize this analytic for different regions and populations.
... As I began doctoral fieldwork in Nepal in 2010, the Limbu organisation leaders I met with were deeply engaged in presenting a viable, legitimate, and authoritative sketch of a future Limbuwan state to the world. As I discuss in detail below, these efforts are telling for the specific 'terms of recognition' operating at the time (Appadurai 2002;Shneiderman 2010) and -ultimately -how this 'fragile' moment in national politics counterintuitively supported a continued national territorialisation. ...
... There were a number of in-depth studies from the 1970s, which have analysed changing relations of production in the Nepali hills (Caplan, 1970;Macfarlane, 1976), and some have gone further to analyse linkages between the village economy and capitalism in the centre, relating it to Nepal's structural position in the global economy (Blaikie, Cameron, & Seddon, 2001, 2002a, 2002bSeddon, 1987). Recent studies, however, are few and far between, with a few exceptions including Fitzpatrick's (2011) study on rural class differentiation and cardamom cultivation in eastern Nepal, and a series of studies of agrarian change and food security in the Himalayas by Adhikari (2001Adhikari ( , 2008. 1 While there have been attempts to portray Nepal in its totality as a subaltern Himalayan space, it is easy to overlook the powerful role played by the Hindu Nepali state of the hills and its political control over highland populations in its internal colonization project (Shneiderman, 2010). This paper seeks to take contemporary literature on agrarian change and local-global linkages in Nepal and other mountain regions a step further. ...
The relationship that mountain communities have with global capitalism are complex, being mediated by a diverse topography and ecology, both of which provide opportunities for capital accumulation, while also isolating older, “pre-capitalist” modes of production. This paper takes a case study valley from Nepal's eastern hills, tracing over two centuries of agrarian change and evolving interactions between “adivasi” and “semi-feudal” economic formations with capitalism. In recent years, the expansion of markets, rising demand for cash, and climate stress have solidified migrant labour as a core component of livelihoods, and the primary mechanism of surplus appropriation from the hill peasantry. Through a focus on three altitudinal zones, however, it is demonstrated how the trajectory of this transformation, including the interactions with persisting pre-capitalist formations, is mediated by both political–economic processes and the local agro-ecological context.
... Most spatial references though are made to the eastern Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau (cf. Blackburn 2007 ;van Driem 2001 ;Klieger 2006 ;Shneiderman 2010 ) . While Willem van Schendel ( 2002 ) attributes a certain centrality to the region, others like James Scott ( 2009 ) primarily perceive its peripheral location and status or highlight the potential for escape from state intervention and dominance. ...
In conventional views, pastoralism was classified as a stage of civilization that needed to be abolished and transcended in order to reach a higher level of development. In this context, global approaches to modernize a rural society have been ubiquitous phenomena independent of ideological contexts. The 20th century experienced a variety of concepts to settle mobile groups and to transfer their lifestyles to modern perceptions. Permanent settlements are the vivid expression of an ideology-driven approach. Modernization theory captured all walks of life and tried to optimize breeding techniques, pasture utilization, transport and processing concepts.
New insights into other aspects of pastoralism such as its role as an adaptive strategy to use marginal resources in remote locations with difficult access could only be understood as a critique of capitalist and communist concepts of modernization. In recent years a renaissance of modernization theory-led development activities can be observed. Higher inputs from external funding, fencing of pastures and settlement of pastoralists in new townships are the vivid expression of 'modern' pastoralism in urban contexts. The new modernization programme incorporates resettlement and transformation of lifestyles as to be justified by environmental pressure in order to reduce degradation in the age of climate change.
... 20 As noted earlier, in their efforts these indigenous scholars are building on and to a certain extent complicating the pre-existing multi-ethnic-nationalist narrative constructed by Han Chinese scholars in post-1950s China. Moreover, their scholarly productions can be added to a mounting and highly productive critique of Scott's reimaginings of Van Schendel's notion of 'Zomia' (Fiskesjö, 2010;Friedman, 2011;Jonsson, 2010Jonsson, , 2012Shneiderman, 2010;Scott, 2009;Van Schendel, 2002 (Keyes, 1979;Leach, 1954;Lehman, 1979;Moerman, 1965). ...
In my paper, I offer a brief analysis of just some of the ways in which certain members of the Akha transnational minority group are redefi ning Akhaness amidst the Upper Mekong Region’s ongoing transition from “battlefields to markets”. Drawing on 32 months of research in the region, I bring attention to the efforts of certain Akha elite to promote a more formal pan-Akha sense of belonging of a profoundly religious nature. I highlight the complex ways in which certain local Akha actors are reshaping culture by way of multiple and shifting orientations to the past as well as the nationaland transnational in the contexts of social gatherings, communal rituals, linguistic productions, multimedia engagements, and cross-border travel. I argue that by virtue of these simultaneously multi-sited representations of Akhaness, certain Akha are composing their own theories of culture that in part challenge and incorporate dominant models of nationalism and globalization, all the while reproducing and claiming a distinctly Akha way of being in the world.
This chapter is a study of Sino-Tibetan borderlands situated in the Hengduan Mountain region, which is adjacent with Southeast Asia in the south, and gradually lowers its altitude when it meets the southwestern edge of the Mongolia Plateau and the Loess Plateau of Northwest China. Geologically situated between the pastoral Tibet and agricultural China, this vast mountainous region is a home to both human diversity and biodiversity hotspots. However, this human-nonhuman mountain diversity is often shaded over inadvertently by the binary Sino-Tibet interface in the politically centred studies of the borderlands. This China-Tibet duality landmarked in the Hengduan Mountains is often characterised as ‘frontier’ (Gros 2019), ‘convergence zone’ (Jinba 2014: 6), and ‘the middle ground’ (Lipman 1997: xxxiii; Giersch 2006:3). As the region is a unique part of the Earth’s geological creativity and inter-Asian environmental connectivity, I take a Zomian approach to recontextualise Sino-Tibetan borderlands not merely as borderlands but also as a multitude of montane habitats with steep ecological gradients in close proximity, which promote biodiversity, ecologically niched human dwellings, and ethnolinguistic diversification. The Hengduan Mountains as Sino-Tibetan borderlands and as a unique ecogeological region of its own, deserve more complex understandings in both human and environmental terms. Environmentally, I intend to lay out a set of ecogeological affordances from the Hengduan Mountain region as an unacknowledged environmental basis of the human
centric political duality of Tibet and China. On the human side, I recount the Hengduan
Mountain region as a human diversity hotspot that is environed in the region’s biodiversity.
Scholars have long considered the era of modern education in Nepal as inaugurated by foreign actors in the 1950s. Based on an analysis of two central publications of the relatively overlooked educator and intellectual Jaya Prithvi Bahadur Singh, this paper aims to shed new light on the educational history of the early twentieth century Himalaya. By employing a lens of global history, the study challenges the narrative of a ‘sudden arrival’ of modern education in Nepal in 1950s. In doing so, the paper aims to demonstrate the relevance of Singh’s thought to the global emergence of modern, progressive, and humanistic forms of education in the early twentieth century.
When, how, and why did the Himalaya become the highest mountains in the world? In 1800, Chimborazo in South America was believed to be the world's highest mountain, only succeeded by Mount Everest in 1856. Science on the Roof of the World tells the story of this shift, and the scientific, imaginative, and political remaking needed to fit the Himalaya into a new global scientific and environmental order. Lachlan Fleetwood traces untold stories of scientific measurement and collecting, indigenous labour and expertise, and frontier-making to provide the first comprehensive account of the East India Company's imperial entanglements with the Himalaya. To make the Himalaya knowable and globally comparable, he demonstrates that it was necessary to erase both dependence on indigenous networks and scientific uncertainties, offering an innovative way of understanding science's global history, and showing how geographical features like mountains can serve as scales for new histories of empire.
The concept of “Zomia”—a transnational region centred on the greater Southeast Asian massif, inhabited primarily by putatively state-resisting “hill tribal” peoples—has gained considerable traction in the social sciences and area studies literatures over the past decade, particularly since the publication of Scott (2009). Yet there are at least two noticeable gaps in these literatures: first, linguists have hardly engaged with the idea of Zomia thus far. This is perhaps surprising, given the centrality of language to socio-cultural conceptions of Zomia as outlined in van Schendel (2002) and Scott (2009: 14, 21). Second, the literature on Zomia contains very few mentions of the Eastern Himalaya, its peoples and their languages. This is perhaps less surprising, given the relative lack of detailed information that has generally been available concerning Eastern Himalayan languages and cultures, but it is nevertheless unfortunate; as I will argue below, the Eastern Himalaya should feature centrally in considerations about what Zomia “is”, and why it is the way it is.
This chapter will work towards addressing both gaps, by means of a linguist’s rethinking of Zomia from an Eastern Himalayan perspective. In it, I will focus both on contemporary conceptions of Zomia, its peoples and their cultural-linguistic attributes, as well as on Scott’s proposed explanation for these cultural-linguistic attributes in terms of his concept of state evasion (Scott 2009: 174, Ch. 6). After demarcating an area, which I will label the “mid-Eastern Himalaya”, I will situate this area in terms of discourses about Zomia and Zomians, examine evidence from linguistic distributions, socio-historical context, and socio-cultural features, and suggest that, although the mid-Eastern Himalayan region shows clear and, in a sense, prototypically “Zomian” attributes (called “Zomianisms” for short), clear evidence that these attributes are best explained by means of a “state evasion” hypothesis seems to be lacking. I will therefore advance an alternative hypothesis: that mid-Eastern Himalayan Zomianisms are less likely to represent innovative reactions to the power of an expanding state than they are to represent conservations of adaptively successful survival strategies on their own terms (see also Lieberherr’s chapter in this volume). Although these survival strategies may indeed have fortuitously enabled mid-Eastern Himalayan Zomians to subsequently resist such states as they eventually came to encounter, they seem unlikely to have been motivated by state formation in any way. I will close by considering some implications of this analysis for the Zomia hypothesis more generally.
There was no aspect of trade in agricultural
products prior to the coming of British East India
Company in Assam. The practice of barter system was
the dominant medium of socio-economic life among the
people of Assam. Involvement of commercial aspect in
agricultural products began after the introduction of
permanent settlement in Bengal which was linked to
the trade and revenue policy of the British East India
Company. The treaty of Yandaboo ended not only the
political problem of Assam but also transformed the
economic system as a whole. In due course of time, land
became the primary source of revenue for the Company.
The Company encouraged the peasants to proliferate
agricultural products based on the demand of overseas
trade. Thereafter, they began the collection of cash
revenue from the peasants which became a new system of land revenue collection. Besides, the former native
rulers collected the land revenue either in the form of
kind or through voluntary service to state known as the
paik system. The agricultural products of India attracted
the overseas market and gave considerable revenue to
the British and it had also influenced colonial market
interest in the agriculture products of Assam. However,
British could not carry out trading activities efficiently
due to less productivity of agriculture and shortage
of skilled manpower. Though self-sufficient village
economy was prevalent at that time, but it could not meet
the demand of the commercial purpose of the British
Company. Less population in certain areas of Assam
was due to epidemic diseases and political upheaval
and huge acres of fertile land remained vacant. The
demand for cash crops in the market encouraged the
British Company to call outside cultivators to grow
cash crops which eventually led to green revolution in
Assam as well as commercialization of agriculture. The
outside cultivators who were enterprising and skillful
introduced different types of agricultural activities
in Assam later, the local inhabitants along with the
outsiders began to adopt cash crop cultivation.
The formal demarcation of what is today the Burma-China border began following the British conquest of Upper Burma from the Konbaung dynasty in 1885 and the signing of international agreements with the Qing Empire (1886, 1894, 1897), the process only completed in the 1960s. Around the turn of the century and into the twentieth, therefore, the highlands between British Burma and Qing (later Republican) China remained a contested ‘borderland’; specifically, one over which successive lowland states had never been able to exert direct control – a space James C. Scott and others have named ‘Zomia’ – but toward which they had been expanding by the mid-nineteenth century (if not earlier). This article looks not at the ways in which Zomia’s inhabitants contested this expanding state authority, which has been the focus of most work on this space, but how the British pressed their territorial claims over part of this contested borderland vis-à-vis the Chinese. Salt was a monopoly of both the Government of India (of which Burma was a province until 1935) and the Qing and Republican states. Smuggling – trade, to British eyes – salt from Burma into China thus undermined Chinese sovereignty qua the expression of the latter’s monopoly powers. Complaints about smuggling were met with ‘masterly inactivity’, not only because the colonial administration was weak in Upper Burma and along the frontier, but also because it meant the British imperial state could permit the expansion of ‘legitimate’ trade and thereby contest Chinese sovereignty qua its territorial claims over the borderland. In contrast to other works positing that smuggling over defined borders undermined state power, this article shows how a permissive attitude to complaints about smuggling undergirded British sovereignty and was very much part of the making of the border.
It is difficult to expound in any pithy fashion on the imprint that James C. Scott's work has had on writing history in the orbit of Asia. Where to start? From The Moral Economy of the Peasant all the way to Against the Grain , Scott's work has found receptive and fertile ground among his peers in Asian studies, who have often proudly pointed out to their non-Asianist colleagues that Scott is “one of their own.” This has certainly been true “internally” as well, in the ways that Southeast Asianists have spoken to their fellow professionals in the larger, allied subdisciplines of South and East Asian studies. It does not matter that Scott's books have touched on a wide variety of subjects: the central concerns with power, agency, space, and the essence of a shared humanity have all resonated with his professional interlocutors.
In 1937, Burma formally separated from India. The separation might seem self-evident, given India and Burma's framing as distinct, bounded spaces. Yet, in the Patkai mountains straddling them, separation was a complex process with only a murky sense of finality, more problematic and contested than generally acknowledged. The border ran through similar groups and complex networks, which posed recurring problems for local inhabitants and frontier officials. As independence neared, colonial officials unsuccessfully tried to reshape the Patkai's territorialization. Viewed from the Patkai, the narrative of an amiable divorce between two ill-suited partners crumbles. The separation was one of several partitions that created bounded spaces across South Asia during the twentieth century. Seeing Burma and India as distinct others privileges spatio-cultural hierarchies rooted in colonial frameworks, assimilated by postcolonial political arrangements and nation-state-centric scholarship. This article foregrounds the need to explore how India and Burma were made against one another and recover alternative spatialities.
This article attempts to engage with the trends of writing sociology in India by locating the argument within the discourse of coproduction of space, identity and belonging. It aims to interrogate colonial as well as post-colonial construal of hill-valley binaries in the context of the dictum of methodological nationalism in India. It is categorically imperative on our part to posit ‘the historicising the Himalayas’ in terms of colonial dispensation and coevolution of economy, culture, space, identity, belonging, nationalism, historiography and polity. Moving beyond established methodological, nationalism would not be an easy task as it entails heavy criticism mostly in the domain of political construction of national identity. However, the change of our analytical tools, objects and methods might contribute in developing a more inclusive social theory, not painted by self-evident sociological theory of the nation-state.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the wool trade articulated new political and economic relationships between Tibet and the British Raj in India and the world beyond. Kalimpong, the Eastern Himalayan town in North Bengal, flourished on the basis of India’s frontier trade with Tibet for about five decades. By placing the trans-frontier wool trade of colonial India at the centre of analysis, this article seeks to highlight the material history that existed on its landed periphery. An attempt will be made to understand the emergence, pattern and significance of India’s trans-frontier trade with Tibet in the light of major geopolitical changes in this region and the world in the twentieth century. The article will argue that the channelling of trade through the Kalimpong–Lhasa route was driven by multiple colonial interests, as well as commercial considerations. In particular, safeguarding the empire and producing a unified sovereign space in the newly established Himalayan frontier constituted a major concern of the British Raj.
The history of British rule in the Indian Himalaya exemplifies the mutual enforcement of social identities and political cultures in modern South Asia. For the Khas ethnic majority of the Himachal Pradesh–Uttarakhand borderland, the colonial power's differentiation between “secular” and “religious” authorities engendered the division of substantially commensurable groups into “caste Hindu” and “tribal” societies. In demarcating borders along the “natural barrier” between the states, the British had severed a politically potent grassroots theocracy from its underlings, consolidated the fragmentation of the Shimla Hill States, and ultimately encouraged the development of a composite political cultures that complemented Khas traditions with Brahmanical creeds from the plains.
Northeast India, a ‘zipper region’ that gives impetus to Southeast Asian and Himalasian studies, is marked by complexities and ambiguities. The paper examines the multiple identity construction in contemporary Assam, the central state of this region and seeks to recover the other experiences that make ethnic life-world possible while challenging the ethnocentric discourses—in academia, politics, public and social movements. Acknowledging the presence of common or possibly universal processes behind the production of such discourses, it aims to interrogate the factors that cut across socio-cultural, political-economical or ecological dimensions. It further examines the multiple discourses and narratives that makes that social possible in the region. In doing so, it locates the strategic positioning of such discourses and how they deal with Indian nation-state and beyond. This paper in essence is interested in the question of possibility of various discourses—as a question of post-history.
Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance, and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through recent writings on modern mountains. These include heightened attention to the importance of mountains as arenas for the performance of gendered, racial, national, and class-based subjectivities, and the persistence of earlier attitudes and activities in avowedly disenchanted modern visions of uplands. For all of the successes of recent scholarship, more work remains in order to consider mountains in global contexts and to come to terms with our continued entanglement in modern ways of understanding and acting in high places. Looking ahead, it is vital that historians think with and about mountains in order to contribute positively and persuasively to discussions on the human and environmental impacts of global change.
In this chapter, I have used the concepts of ‘adivasi’ and ‘peasant’ as analytical categories to emphasize distinct societies with respect to their relationships to the land, nature of economic system, and relationships with the state over the control of land. If we consider ‘adivasi and ‘peasant’ as analytical categories, then the centrality of ‘land’ in defining the two categories become obvious. ‘Land’ is an important material possession (a physical entity, property, a resource) with its cultural and symbolic relevance for peasants. For the adivasi, land is a defining feature of their collective identity but it is primarily an inalienable wealth, not a commodity. The peasant-land relationship draws heavily on capitalist ontology of commodity and property while the adivasi-land relationships emphasizes the total embeddedness and mutual production of land, people and culture in totality.
The historiography of the nineteenth century Panjab privileges the core constituency of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s ‘empire’, whereby the margins are represented only as conquered territories. This article shifts the perspective by highlighting the context of ‘Zomian’ margins in the making of an ‘empire’. Based on coeval travellers’ accounts, news from Lahore Durbar and British Indian governmental sources, the focus is on the impact of economic and political contingencies on the policies of Sikh Sardars, the Maharaja of Lahore and, ultimately, the British Indian government in the Western Himalayan region. We shall, however, limit ourselves to economic interaction between the hegemonic empire and Kangra hill states to bring out the dynamics of dominance and subversion. The underlying assumption of dominance and eventual integration into the ‘empire’ was rather economic: in services, materials and money. It was, however, not a relationship of political dominance only. While the subjugation of hill states alienated revenue to the ‘empire’, it also opened new markets to the hill products and services that had cultural and economic implications. The new markets were welcomed; the alienation of revenue was not. The alliance, therefore, had an uneasy aspect, nuanced by a subtle protest, that of the weak against the strong: an indirect, meek and symbolic resistance. Consequently, when the strength of ‘empire’ dwindled, such protests acquired accentuated dimensions. The process of such protests is vital in understanding the decline of Lahore ‘empire’, barely a decade after the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
Between the early twentieth century and the 1960s, the Indian state began to incorporate the easternmost Himalayas. This article illuminates this state-making process by examining its material and communicative culture, embodied in tour diaries. These diaries were not private reflections written during one's spare time but the compulsory output of administrative tours. Often followed by more reflective notes, their perceived insights were used to determine local or general policy changes. Drawing on a literature that sees paperwork as constitutive of bureaucracy, this article argues that tour diaries exemplified and buttressed a certain form of frontier governance, marked by itinerancy and personalization well into independence. In their historical development, their language and materiality, their administrative usage, tour diaries embodied more than anything else the contingent, spatially uneven, and fractured nature of Indian state-making in the Himalayas, revealing the importance of process geographies anchored in paperwork circulation for its sustenance. Transmitted whole or extracted into policy files, diaries tied wandering officers together in a distinctive community of practice, policies, and ideas – preserving the fiction of the frontier state as a coherent whole in uncertain circumstances. As much as through maps, regulations, and routes, the frontier was made through writing.
In the contemporary global imagination, Darjeeling typically figures on two accounts: as a unique tourism site replete with colonial heritage and picturesque nature, and as the productive origin for some of the world's most exclusive teas. In this commodified and consumable form, Darjeeling is part of a wide array of frontier places that are increasingly incorporated into the circuits of global capitalism. In the present article, I argue that Darjeeling is in fact an early and emblematic example of such incorporation. By connecting emerging literature on the pre-colonial history of the area with a critical reading of colonial sources, I trace the shifts and erasures that enabled Darjeeling's commodification—a process that involved its transformation from a ‘wild’ Himalayan frontier into a speculative wasteland and, ultimately, into a picturesque and productive ‘summer place’. Reading through a range of material and representational interventions, I uncover the particular assemblage of government and capital that enabled this transformation and highlight its potential resonances with contemporary cases of frontier commodification in South Asia and beyond.
This review article provides a reading guide to scholarly literature published in English about Nepal's political transformation since 2006, when Nepal's decade-long civil conflict between Maoist and state forces formally ended. The article is structured around four major themes: (1) the Maoist insurgency or ‘People's War’; (2) state formation and transformation; (3) identity politics; and (4) territorial and ecological consciousness. We also address the dynamics of migration and mobility in relation to all of these themes. Ultimately, we consider the Maoist movement as one element in a much broader process of transformation, which with the benefit of hindsight we can situate in relation to several other contemporaneous trajectories, including: democratization, identity-based mobilization, constitutional nationalism, international intervention, territorial restructuring, migration and the remittance economy, and the emergence of ecological and other new forms of consciousness. By looking across the disciplines at scholarship published on all of these themes, we aim to connect the dots between long-standing disciplinary traditions of scholarship on Nepal and more recent approaches to understanding the country's transformation.
The Indian Himalayan Region, a climate change hotspot, is witnessing a massive surge in hydropower development alongside a dramatic rise in natural hazard events. This article explores indigenous people's response to this intersection of concerns around hazards and contentious development beyond more legible instances of social movements or resistance. Through an ethnographic case study located in the Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, the site of a 6.9 magnitude earthquake, controversial hydropower projects, and an indigenous antidam protest, I show how people's relationship with a sacred, animate landscape is not easily translatable into the clear goals of environmental politics. Antidam activists and environmentalists link growing ecological precarity in Sikkim to state-led hydropower construction, but for many lay indigenous people, these earthquakes raise deeper cultural anxieties. I demonstrate how these anxieties are grounded in a longer history of the contested relationship between marginalized peoples and hegemonic state and nonstate powers, a relationship that continues in the fraught relationship of the Himalayan margins to the Indian state. I argue that critical engagements with indigenous environmentalism must be in dialogue with diverse interpretations and registers of loss and erasure. In this I follow recent calls to decolonize the Anthropocene that demand that we move beyond a politics of urgency to examine the slow, historical processes of erasure under colonialism and imperialism. I highlight these narratives to argue for a more holistic approach to the uneven impacts of climate change on mountainous environments and their inhabitants.
This essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930–1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came to link cultivation and territorialization, state violence and food, and dispossession and espionage. I engage with the powerful symbolism attached to rice by colonial and post-colonial officials, border guards, and cultivators who were variously conceived of as peasants and adivasis , as they sought to settle, cultivate, demarcate, and govern new national boundaries in a radically changing landscape. This paper situates rice battles within current discussions on Asia's borderlands to show how rice established the border as a space for alterity and to expose the blurred boundaries between static peasants and mobile adivasis , and between cultivation and soldiering.
This chapter explores how the Bhotiyas dealt with imperial forms of power and authority in order to realize their trade under British colonial rule in nineteenth-century Kumaon. Based on a combined analysis of oral and written historical sources I show that British imperial sovereignty, similar to that of older regimes in the area, remained malleable and contested within the wider relational field of the Bhotiyas’ trans-Himalayan trade. When the British East India Company annexed Kumaon in 1815 it was recognized as a so-called Non-regulation Province, which meant that government officials could flexibly interpret executive orders to suit the realities on the ground. Procedural simplicity and discretionary decisions created scope for both shaping and contesting British hegemony, leading to an adaptive transformation of imperial rule. Through a close examination of British interactions with Kumaon’s traders, the chapter will reveal the frictions that arose from this exceptional legal status. This focus serves to address the broader question of how sovereign claims work through multiple and shifting articulations, from frontier narratives to cartographic representations and from fluid relationships of allegiance to fixed state boundaries. The analysis considers a previous call to conceive High Asia as a continuous zone and an agentive site of political action by arguing that confluent territories and overlapping sovereignties are key to understanding trans-Himalayan trade in an imperial environment.
'Area studies' use a geographical metaphor to visualise and naturalise particular social spaces as well as a particular scale of analysis. They produce specific geographies of knowing but also create geographies of ignorance. Taking Southeast Asia as an example, in this paper I explore how areas are imagined and how area knowledge is structured to construct area 'heartlands' as well as area 'borderlands'. This is illustrated by considering a large region of Asia (here named Zomia) that did not make it as a world area in the area dispensation after World War 2 because it lacked strong centres of state formation, was politically ambiguous, and did not command sufficient scholarly clout. As Zomia was quartered and rendered peripheral by the emergence of strong communities of area specialists of East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia, the production of knowledge about it slowed down. I suggest that we need to examine more closely the academic politics of scale that create and sustain area studies, at a time when the spatialisation of social theory enters a new, uncharted terrain. The heuristic impulse behind imagining areas, and the high-quality, contextualised knowledge that area studies produce, may be harnessed to imagine other spatial configurations, such as 'crosscutting' areas, the worldwide honeycomb of borderlands, or the process geographies of transnational flows. Scholars of all conventional areas can be involved in this project to 'jump scale' and to develop new concepts of regional space.
This book recounts the plight of some hundred thousand refugees of Nepali ethnic origin (also known as the Lhotshampa or 'Southern Borderlander') who claim to have been wrongfully evicted from Bhutan. None of them have returned to Bhutan after their eviction in the early 1990s. The author begins his examination of their plight by discussing the history of Bhutan as it appears in British colonial archives and in current standard national narratives. He then discusses the history of Bhutan from the point of view of 'Bhutanese' refugees (housed in camps in Nepal) presented to him as a foreign researcher. After reviewing Lhotshampa society in Bhutan during the first half of the twentieth century, the book presents the encounter between the culturally Nepali southern part of Bhutan and the Bhutanese state. In its drive towards modernization and development after Indian independence and the Chinese invasion of Tibet, new legislation on citizenships and a homogenizing nationalism lead to Lhotshampa dissidence and the 'demotion' of the Nepali in Bhutan. The book then elaborates how the Lhotshampa became refugees, and why they continue to live in camps in Nepal even at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
This book is a study of religion in a Tibetanised community of highland Nepal. The village of Te, in Mustang District, is nominally Buddhist: until recent times it had a tradition of Sakyapa monasticism, and depends on Nyingmapa tantric priests for ritual and clerical services. However, it also has a thriving cult of territorial divinities involving the performance of animal sacrifices. At first glance, Te appears to be a fundamentally pagan community attempting to preserve its traditions against the efforts of Tibetan Buddhist missionaries. However, a closer investigation reveals that this picture of simple ideological opposition is untenable. A combination of ethnographic observation and a close study of the community's archives-which date back to the 17th century-reveals an altogether more complex picture. Documentary evidence indicates that clan solidarity was gradually replaced by a sense of shared community. The creation of this community was an active process involving the designation of public resources, the production of written laws, a change in the inheritance pattern, and the emergence of ceremonies that entailed the piecemeal adoption of Buddhist rituals and dramatised episodes from Te's history. This complex is best understood in terms of civil religion, a concept developed by Rousseau and later elaborated by writers such as Robert Bellah and Gerald Parsons. While this reified community is ultimately the product of the individuals of which it is composed, it is perceived and represented as an autonomous, "transcendent" entity with a reciprocal influence on their lives.
Affirmative action is an absolute necessity at this juncture in the history of Nepal. The question is how to create a System that best serves the long-term interests of the country's marginalised communities, as well as the nation State as a whole. If the massive machinery of India's welfare State suffers under the demands of its own reservations System, Nepal will have to think carefully about its own infrastructural limitations when crafting its version of affirmative action. One of the biggest challenges will be balancing the prerogatives of federalism with policies of reservation, which by definition require a strong central infrastructure to provide for equitable recognition and distribution of benefits.
Ethnic relations in Nepal today can be seen as the outcome of long-term processes of accommodation between local groups and a centralizing state. In the northwest of the country, state economic and political policies that discriminated among groups on the basis of caste and ethnicity have contributed to the perpetuation of small and insular communities divided by persisting ethnic distinctions. Despite this, there is considerable mobility; individuals and the entire memberships of villages rapidly transfer both their ethnic affiliation and position in the local caste system. The motivation for this seems less an issue of status and caste rank than of change in economic specialization. Changes in the way a group makes its living, in turn, affect the sociocultural system and are accompanied by a renegotiation of affinal relationships in the wider region.
At the turn of the nineteenth century three different indigenous concepts were central to the Nepalese understanding of their polity. These were the possessions (muluk) of the king, the realm (deśa), and the countries (also deśa or des) of a people. Each of these concepts specified a different relationship between ruler, land, and people, and each was legitimated with reference to a different kind of authority: proprietary, ritual, or ancestral. When the East India Company gained politicoeconomic control of the Ganges basin, the Nepalese found that they had to accommodate themselves to a powerful neighbor with alien views on the structure and boundary of the polity. In order to preserve its political autonomy on the subcontinent, the Nepalese government began to reconceive the nature of its polity from a foreign point of view. This article considers reinterpretations by the Nepalese government over a period of one hundred and fifty years of the concepts of possessions, realm, and country in order to form the modern concept of the nation-state.
Drawing on field recordings and recent scholarship on social memory, this article analyses colonial contacts and oral histories in Arunachal Pradesh, in northeast India. It argues that, despite its geographic and cultural isolation, Arunachal did not escape the armed conflict that dominated relations between tribes and external authorities during the colonial period. Two events and their causes are examined: the first visit by a British official to a tribe in 1897; and the raid on a military outpost by tribesmen in 1948. Comparing written histories and documents with local stories about these events, the author demonstrates the need for oral histories.
In this article, I examine the cultural politics of development in a Zimbabwean resettlement scheme, situating state interventions in the deep histories of colonial efforts to discipline rural livelihoods. Popular memories of resistance to colonial conservation, shaped by transnational circuits and constitutive of Zimbabwean nationalism, animate the cultural idioms of entitlement and state power in the 1990s. The contingent micro-politics of agrarian struggle counter a recent tendency toward discursive determinism in anthropological perspectives on development. [development, cultural politics, practice, nationalism, spatiality, governmentality, southern Africa]
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136537/1/ae.1988.15.2.02a00150.pdf
This essay explores the possibility of defining a culture area by the comparative study of oral stories. Although neither the culture area concept nor the comparative study of oral traditions is currently fashionable in anthropology or folklore studies, both were once at the centre of theoretical debates in these disciplines. At the least, the hypothesis in this paper is intended to draw attention to the explanatory potential of both this concept and this methodology.The data presented in the essay comes both from the author's fieldwork on oral stories and rituals in Arunachal Pradesh, India, and from similar collections made in neighbouring regions. Based on this evidence (primarily three separate oral stories and one ritual event), the essay suggests that we can consider the ‘extended eastern Himalayas’ as a culture area. This proposed culture area consists of three regions: central Arunachal Pradesh, the Myanmar (Burma)/India/Bangladesh border, and upland Southeast Asia/Southwest China. Adapting the model of vertical descent from historical linguistics, the argument is that the shared stories derive from a common oral tradition among Tibeto-Burman speakers. Horizontal borrowing across populations is not ruled out, but this model is usually best suited to explain commonalities in material culture. For similarities in verbal culture, such as the common oral stories in the extended eastern Himalayas, vertical borrowing down generations is a more convincing explanation.
Book InformationUnbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan. Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan By Michael Hutt . Oxford and New Delhi: Oxford University Press , 2003 . xx+308 £21.99 ISBN 0 19 566205 9 By Michael Hutt. Oxford and New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pp. xx+308. £21.99 ISBN 0 19 566205 9, 0 19 566205 9.
The roles of various castes (jatis) in Hindu religious activities have been of interest to many students of rural Indian society. As a result, we are quite familiar with the patterns of ceremonial activity of Brahmin priests and of other participants in Brahmanical ritual such as temple keepers of various castes, barbers, carpenters, musicians, etc. (Dube, 1955; Opler and Singh, 1948; Planalp, 1956; Srinivas, 1952). Many of these patterns of religious participation are described and prescribed in the Sanskritic literature of Hinduism, and so fall within the “great tradition” of Hinduism (Redfield, 1956).
This paper is an exploration of two models, “Anthropologyland” and “Historyland,” which exist in the practices and minds of anthropologists and historians. It is about how particular forms of knowledge are created, written and spoken about. It is about what historians and anthropologists do and say they do.
Cultural Variability and Drift in the Himalayan Hills GERALD D. BERREMAN University of California, Berkeley T HE lower Himalaya mountains between western Kashmir and eastern Nepal are populated by peoples sharing common and distinct cultural, linguistic, and historical traditions. Therefore, this is clearly a culture area within the usual meaning of that term. The populations of this area, collec tively termed Pahari ( of the mountains ), comprise a variety of subgroups which share basic cultural patterns but show local differences in such features as dialect, ceremonial forms, deities worshipped, house styles, dress and orna mentation, range of castes, and rules of marriage. These variations are often extremely limited in distribution so that it is possible for one acquainted with a region to identify readily the particular valley or ridge from which a person comes by his speech or dress. It is not difficult to pass through two or more such areas in a day's trek. This highly localized cultural variability is especially striking to one acquainted with the people of the plains to the south. A second impressive feature, at least in the subarea to be reported here, is the comparative cultural homogeneity across caste lines within a particular locality in the hills. A person's caste affiliation is generally impossible to deter mine, even by someone of his own area, except by direct inquiry or by observ ing him in his traditional occupation. In this account, the facts supporting these generalizations will be briefly described. Then an attempt will be made to analyze and explain them in terms of common conditions and processes. Some further light may thereby be thrown upon the concepts of cultural drift and culture area, their usefulness and relationship to one another. The research reported here was carried out in and about the village of Sirkanda, situated in the lower JIimalaya mountains of North India, about 150 miles north and slightly east of Delhi and within a day's hike of the well known hill station, Mussoorie. 1 Sirkanda is large for a hill village, containing some 384 residents, half of whom live all or most of the time in outlying cattle sheds or field houses and half of whom live in the village proper. The people of Sirkanda are speakers of a subdialect of the Central Pahari language or dialect group. They live on the western border of the area in which that language is spoken, next to Jaunsar Bawar where begins the Western Pahari language. 2 They are also on the western border of the former princely state (now district) of Tehri Garhwal. They spend most of their lives within the 4 air-mile radius of Sirkanda which comprises the 3 parallel spurs of hills known as Bhatbair ( sheep's den ), containing less than 5,000 people in 60 villages and settle
Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity. Melvyn C. Goldstein and Matthew T. Kapstein. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 207 pp.