This book rethinks Northeast India as a lived space, a centre of interconnections and unfolding histories, instead of an isolated periphery. Questioning dominant tropes and assumptions around the Northeast, it examines socio-political and historical processes, border issues, the role of the state, displacement and development, debates over natural resources, violence, notions of body and belonging, movements, tensions and relations, and strategies, struggles and narratives that frame discussions on the region.
Drawing on current and emerging research in Northeast India studies, this work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, human geography, sociology and social anthropology, history, cultural studies, media studies and South Asian studies.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures. Preface Introducing Geographies of Difference: Explorations in Northeast Indian Studies. Acknowledgements. List of Contributors. Remembering Bianca Son: A Brief Overview of Her Scholarly Life. Introduction: Northeastern Research Entanglements PART 1: HISTORICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS 1. Reading Fürer-Haimendorf in Northeast India 2. The Role of Informants in the Construction of the Zo as the Chin, Lushai and the Kuki of Burma and of India 3. Sutured landscapes: Making of an Imperial Frontier in Tripura (1848–1854) 4. Portrait of a Place: Reflections about Fieldwork from the Foothills of Northeast India 5. Ethnographic Study and Cultural Production in Sikkim PART 2: POLITICS OF LAND AND MATERIAL RESOURCES 6. Hydro-dollar Dreams: Emergent Local Politics of Large Dams and Small Communities 7. Violence, Agrarian Change and the Politics of Autonomy in Assam 8. Naga Art and Their Market Through Time. Delocalisation, State Control and Globalisation 9. Youth Fashion and the Identity of Resistance in Northeast India PART 3: IN AND OUT OF THE STATE 10. Decades of ‘Ethnic Massacre’ in Bodoland. The State and the Framing of Conflict in India’s Northeast 11. Diversity and Difference: The Art of Electioneering in Meghalaya 12. From the Shackles of Tradition: Motherhood and Women's Agitation in Manipur 13. Mizo Identity: The Role of the Young Mizo Association (YMA) in Mizoram 14. Situating Language, Recognizing Multilingualism: Linguistic Identities and Mother Tongue Attachment in Northeast India and the Region AFTERWORD Contested, Vertical, Fragmenting: De-Partitioning ‘Northeast India’ Studies. Index
About the Author :
Mélanie Vandenhelsken is a researcher in anthropology at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and Documentation of Inner and South Asian Cultural History (CIRDIS), University of Vienna, Austria, and was formerly at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh is Research Fellow, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Bengt. G. Karlsson is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden.
