Kodagu Walking Trails and Indigenous Heritage Making: A Bioregional Study (original) (raw)
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The Oriental Anthropologist , 2021
A culturally vibrant country like India has multiple embedded forms of folk traditions accompanied by an essentially rich history that is constituted by a cultural-ecological heritage. West Bengal, one of the eastern states of India, is inhabited by numerous ecosystem-dependent communities. Nature, culture, and livelihoods remain deeply entangled in the indigenous practices, blurring concrete boundaries that separate tangible from intangible heritage. In mainstream "ecological" and "heritage" discourses, the folk performative customs and their architects are often projected as harbingers of ecological wisdom-relying on nature and, at the same time, giving back to her. Shedding light on Patuas of Naya Pingla, West Medinipur, and Chhau mask makers from Charida, Purulia, we complicate this line of argument by exploring complex interactions between material and cultural variables influencing these "living heritage" traditions. We have been "immersed" in dense ethnographic realms of the field to unpack complexities determining complex human-nature intersections that concurrently offer livelihood provisions and cultural sustenance among folk communities of rural South Asia. By weaving multilayered web of information and exploring the nonlinear ecology-economy-culture correlation along the two case studies, we have brought to the fore the significance of place-based narratives to inform
IN THIS CORNER OF THE WORLD: STORIED PLACES AND THEIR NARRATIVE CONNECTIONS WITH ECOLOGY
ISFNR Newsletter 2021, 2021
This brief write-up tries to encapsulate the experience of changing environments, which shapes and sometimes almost negates particular narratives and traditions specifically in the context of the Assamese community in the small town of Jorhat. This essay illustrates the significance of holding onto these belief narratives and how, in doing so, it inevitably helps us sustain the ecology around us.
This paper is a theoretical investigation to identify the relationship between traditional knowledge theory and the impact of ‘absence’ the latter on continuity of Indian historic landscape. The understanding of this relationship is becoming increasingly critical in post-colonial India if the growing dissociation of people and their context is to be prevented and to prepare effective policies which recognize the potential to safeguard ecological balance sustainably. Indian Historic landscapes are epistemic construct or can be considered a creation of collective intelligence. Such geo-cultural expanses embody generations of resource and context specific practices that were evolved to ensure protection and management of natural resources for communities thrived productively. Every geo-cultural region in India shows such a pattern where each or a number of ethic group inhabit eco-sensitive zones and have a series of well defined ‘codes of conduct’ with which individuals and groups (of varied scale and composition) interface with each other and with the landscape. Such codes of conduct and types of interfaces formed a part of the common knowledge shared through a highly evolved system of communication which not only ensured the continual sharing and protection of the information, but also lent people and their community a distinct identity, established their association with their context and most importantly enabled life without creating pressures on the resource. All traditional landscapes (of India) reflect a gamut of well-co-ordinate knowledge systems that governs life and use of resources in context, where the meta-cognitive knowledge exists within the community while its procedural knowledge is owned by specific persons or groups. With the change in properties of context (geo-physical features, natural resources, climatic conditions, flora and fauna), the interfaces and modes of communication of the inhabitants with their environment is modified to protect and maintain resources and support habitation pattern. The operation of such systems had continued unbroken till the 18th cent CE when a new system of resource management was forcefully introduced to dissociate man from his landscape. The superimposition of the Victorian mind for more than two centuries has resulted in severing the bond of men with his landscape and ultimately questioning and living in denial of his traditional self. As a result, with the passage of time, the traditional mainstream has become ‘minority’ and their knowledge is no longer ‘valid’ or competent to manage the landscape which they once sculpted. Today India stands at the cross roads of change. On one side is a scavenged landscape supporting global aspiration and on the side is the growing consciousness towards ‘traditions’ and the relevance of the same in resource management. There are two forces which work against re-integrating the new community with their resource. First, the intellectual amnesia, as the colonized mainstream-mind can no longer accepts the existence and importance of learning from tradition. While the second is the non-conventional form of traditional knowledge i.e. it exists as procedural knowledge which is context and lacks theory. Unlike on-going studies by geographers, biologists, sociologists who look at Indian historic landscapes as a by-product of a particular principle, this paper aims to identify the synchronized operation of hidden sciences which generated by a community or a group of communities to develop habitation systems in consonance with nature. Three landscapes (Braja Bhumi, Bishnupur and Majuli Island) have been selected for the purpose to show the importance and potential of traditional knowledge in developing effective policies for sustainable resource management. It also highlights the importance of the methods of knowledge generation, preservation and communication to determine how human-beings will ultimately impact the environment and validates ‘other’ forms of knowledge over theory.
Erasure, discovery and emergence: The Buderim–Palmwoods Heritage Tramway walking track assemblage
Queensland Review, 2018
A serene little walking track graces the hillside along Mons Road between Buderim and the Bruce Highway. It marks a significant piece of state heritage: the Buderim–Palmwoods Tramway. Behind it lies a story of community driving discovery, emergence, conservation and use. This article tells of the emergence of the walking track using Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage concept to explore the ‘becoming’ of the walking track. Assemblages provide an understanding of heritage as a process rather than a fixed entity, examining the re-territorialisation of the tramway track and the ways in which its boundaries are constantly challenged by human and non-human elements. The continuums of territorialisation/deterritorialisation and materiality/expression offer insights into heritage management. Analysis of the tramway as a heritage assemblage reveals the ongoing process of caring for heritage: it shows the strengths of clear boundaries, and permeable ones, and the importance of both material an...
Sedentarising Conservation: The Politics of Belonging and Rootedness in Gudalur, Nilgiris
The landscape of Gudalur has been shaped and re-shaped by multiple waves of in-and out-migration that date back to the mid-19th century. The political-economic imperatives for these phases of migration have ranged from the development of capitalist relations within the estate economy to the compulsions of the Grow More Food Campaign to the political repatriation of 'Indian' Tamils from erstwhile Ceylon. Notwithstanding this history of inmigration in the making of Gudalur, the politics of 'rootedness' has become central to the governance and management of natural resources. In the recent past, attempts to convert prior zamindari systems of land tenure to ryotwari, recognise forest rights and establish tiger reserves have all employed heuristics of belonging. A significant body of literature exists that critiques the sedentarist metaphysics of rootedness from both social and ecological perspectives, paying attention in particular to the discursive and material limits of essentialised readings of the local. This paper focuses on how the politics of the local in Gudalur has been tied to the sedentarisation of conservation. It highlights how the making of environmental subjectivities has necessitated rendering these variegated pasts as singular and how legal definitions render liminal spaces (between forest and non-forest, Adivasi and non-Adivasi, legality and the illegal) bounded.
Retrospection into the footprints of antiquity, into the life and culture of man and his surrounds has led to intriguing arguments as to the validation of architecture as a reflection of the culture, and architecture as a response to the surrounding "physical determinist" (2) factors by the most eminent. Architecture, described as a "temporal art" (6) is subject to continual change due to conscious or unconscious interventions with changing times and needs of the people. This paper attempts to validate the thoughts of the highest minds and also tries to establish a relationship between the evolution of built form as a response to the needs and culture also assess the role of "physical determinist" (2) factors that shape it over the years. A literary premise is established preceding the analysis of the settlement focusing on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (1) The study being conducted at two levels, both macro and micro level gives an in depth understanding of the fabric at the settlement and the tissue level and validates the essential relationship between man's needs, life and built forms.