An unfashionable mess on the margins : clans, polities and ethnicities in North-East India. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Northeastern highlands are geographically and culturally positioned within Zomia topography. The term Zomia, which is more of a metaphor, refers to the highlands from upland North East India to highlands of Vietnam. Representing strong ethnic, cultural and ecological parallels these highlands, as per Zomia theory, constitute a region of refuge'' which is inhabited by lawless /ungoverned 'tribes'. This critique, using an ethnographic case study, reassesses and points to certain basic rupture and shortcomings in the Zomia theory. Author argues that the highlanders undeniably function in accordance with their customary laws and through self –governing institutions, which in contemporary times have the backing of the modern state, though disastrously.
Nomadic Peoples, 2011
Pastoral mobility in mountain environments always implicates indigenous forms of agency vis-à-vis the surrounding states with which people are interlinked, for instance through trade relations, contested border demarcations or natural resource regulations. In this paper, we analyse such interactions in terms of an ongoing 'politics of scale', that is to say a politics of the spatial dimensions structuring social life. Our case study focuses on the Bhotiyas, former trans-Himalayan traders who practise a sort of combined mountain agriculture in the high valleys of the Kumaon Himalaya, bordering China. The interdisciplinary approach foregrounds several registers of mobility, from agro-pastoral to ritual techniques and from property rights to ethnic identities.
Reconsidering "Zomia" from an Eastern Himalayan perspective
The concept of “Zomia” – a trans-national hill region in Southeast Asia characterised by a predominance of “tribal” populations mainly speaking Tibeto-Burman languages – has gained considerable traction among social scientists other than linguists, particularly since the publication of Scott’s (2009) The Art of (Not) Being Governed. In Scott’s view, “Zomia” is best understood as a “shatter zone”, in which “refugees fleeing” the expansion of valley states - “Zomians” - have established societies whose social structures, productive strategies, settlement patterns, material cultures, linguistic practices and group identities - “Zomianisms” - are “deliberately” designed to evade subjection by a neighbouring valley state. What does the “Zomian” hypothesis tell us about prehistory? In Scott’s view, that the people currently inhabiting the Zomian region are where they are, and live how they do, for the precise reason that their ethnolinguistic ancestors fled the expansion of rice-growing valley states at some time within the preceding 2000 years. If it is persuasive, Scott’s thesis would argue in favour of viewing hill groups in the Eastern Himalaya, and perhaps also the languages that they speak, as essentially secondary, and attributable to precursor populations who at one time inhabited either the Brahmaputra Valley floodplain or the Tibetan Plateau, and who were effectively pushed into the areas they currently inhabit as a result of in-principle specifiable state expansion events within something like the past 2000 years. In this paper, I will argue that although historical state expansion conditions in the Brahmaputra Valley and/or the Tibetan Plateau are in principle available within the time period specified, evidence from ethnographic observations and language distributions in the mid-Eastern Himalayan region suggest that Scott’s “state evasion” argument is fundamentally misguided in a large number of its aspects, at least with respect to these populations. We find better support for the likelihood that Eastern Himalayan populations fundamentally practice a set of successful adaptations to a specifiable social-physical environment, which neither require nor are in most ways illuminated through references to a state. Better support is found for the likelihood that Eastern Himalayan populations - and, by implication, at least some Zomian groups elsewhere - exhibit cultural and linguistic archaisms (i.e., conservative features) that predate the emergence of states in this region – even if they may, indeed, have eventually (and perhaps fortuitously) assisted these populations in retaining relatively high degrees of independence from neighbouring states. In all likelihood, at least some and perhaps many “Zomian” groups have been who they are, where they are, and speaking many of the languages that they do, for considerably more than 2000 years – not because they are refugees from a historical state, but rather because their way of life has proved to be successful on its own terms.
2018
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-historical entityʼ (van Schendel 2002). The historical imagination of the place is analysed with regard to Fürer-Haimendorf’s research—and its gaps—in the area (Baruah), to the partition of India (van Schendel), to the Zo on the Indo-Burmese border (Son), and to Tripura (Sen). The gaze of the state and its concrete implications are discussed through the study of linguistic policies in the region (Turin), of elections in Meghalaya (Günauer) and in the Bodo areas in Assam—often accompanied by violence—(Deka), of change in artistic production and artists’ living standards under state control (Odyuo), and of exclusion and communalism in connivance with the state in Mizoram (Singh). The papers also highlight various outcomes of the interplay of the politics of resources and local issues of belonging and identity, such as in Assam where ownership of land produces violence, deaths and displacement (Barbora); however, in Arunachal Pradesh, people actively seek participation in hydropower projects (Ete). The encounter of anthropologists with people also contributes to producing the place, as shown in the papers on Assam and Nagaland (Kikon) and on Sikkim (Vandenhelsken). In Sikkim and Meghalaya, Northeast India is far from being disconnected from the world, but young people actively take part in transnational flows of ideas as revealed by their engagement with Korean fashion (Kharsyntiew). Women and their body also experience the tensions between ideas travelling in and through the place, along with the preconceptions and violence they carry (Soibam).
2024
This essay sees the form and functioning of the Zeliangrong Naga community as a work in progress. Rather than a perennial, historically immutable and delimited entity, the (relatively recent) formation of the Zeliangrong community indicates that tribes can be formed afresh and that tribal identities are constantly in flux. I begin by tracing and placing the origins of the Zeliangrong Naga as told by Zeliangrong elders and circulating origin and migration stories. Then, continuing my focus on ethnic alignment and realignment, I studied the Zeliangrong movement that emerged in the 1920s. At first, they advocated a Naga Raj through the ousting of the colonial government. Over time, however, this rebellion changed direction and reduced its ambitions to the creation of a Zeliangrong homeland that would unite the Zeliangrong people who currently inhabit three different states of Northeast India, namely Manipur, Nagaland and Assam. Drawing both on historical analysis and fresh ethnography this essay shows how over time the Zeliangrong ethnic identity has come under strain and is increasingly internally contested with its constituent parts now expressing divergent political aspirations while also struggling over status, standing and dominance within.