Reworking Culture: Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in the Garo Hills, North East India

ISBN-13: 9788194831693 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 328 str.

Erik de Maaker

Opis

Reworking Culture: Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in Garo Hills, North-East India provides intimate insights into the lives of Garo hill farmers, and the challenges they face in day-to-day life. Focusing on the ongoing reinterpretation of traditions, or customs, the book reveals the inadequacy of the all too often assumed characterization of upland societies as culturally homogenous, internally cohesive, and unchanging. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork,the book focuses on a rural area where land constitutes the most important resource, and where a substantial number of people practise traditional Garo animism. The book explores how people create and continually reinterpret the multiple relationships that connect them as a community, to the spirits,and to the land. These relationships are embedded in normative frameworks that call for compliance, yet leave room for ambiguity and negotiation. Far from being immutable, these need to be constantly expressed, (re-)interpreted, and enacted. The book thus shows how Garo traditions, referred to as niam, are continuously revised and reworked in response to new economic and political opportunities, as well as to changes in the ontological landscape.

This book provides intimate insights into the lives of farmers in Garo Hills, North-East India. Based on a long-term ethnographic engagement, it focuses on followers of traditional Garo animism, whose land constitutes their most important resource. In response to new economic and political opportunities, as well as to changes in the ontological landscape, people continually reinterpret the multiple relationships that connect them as a community, as well as to thespirits, and the land.

Recenzje

Reworking Culture is a refreshing addition to the ever-growing literature on studies of Northeast India. It represents an important departure from existing studies in many ways....Reworking Culture is a study of the Garos of Northeast India. Yet its scope goes far beyond. (...) Anyone interested in the study of tribes and ethnographic fieldwork will find this book enriching. It offers many insights that an exemplary and sustained ethnographer can generate where others might fail.

O autorze

Erik de Maaker is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His research interests include place making, relatedness, religion, heritage, materiality, visuality, and the life cycle. Erik is also a visual anthropologist. His publications include the co-edited Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia (Routledge 2019); and Unequal land Relations in North East India: Custom, Gender and the Market (NESRC 2020) as well as Trans-Himalayan Environmental Humanities: Symbiotic Indigeneity and the Animist Earth (Routledge, 2021). He is a founding member of the Asian Borderlands Research Network.