Full Description
This volume focuses on socio- spatial practices of indigenous communities in India. It explores the interrelation between the built environments and lifeworlds, i.e. practices, patterns, and structures of everyday life. The chapters deal with different ideas and definitions of indigeneity, while also addressing the complex equations between the production and perception of built forms, indigenous technologies, on the one hand, and social, environmental and political contexts, questions of aesthetics, identity, and self-representation on the other.
From Adivasi art and sacred sites to craft villages and nomadic pastoralists in western India, from indigenous bangle makers in urban north India to terracotta crafts people on the south, each chapter focuses on different communities and the contours of their contemporary lifeworlds. The contributions actively attempt to foreground the logic and perspectives of the communities themselves as the epistemological centre of the architectural and material discourses on indigeneity.
This book will be useful for students, teachers, and researchers of architecture, urban design, urban studies, urban development and planning, anthropology, sociology, and museum studies. It will also be of interest to urban planners and designers, policy planners, local government authorities, and professionals engaged in the discipline.
Contents
Introduction: Indigenous Architecture in India 1. Studying Bachchom Bayer Ba: The Indigenous Floor Art of Kolhan 2. The Sacred Grove and the Livelihood and Identity of Santals 3. Flooded Villages, Foldable Houses, and Flexible Living 4. Decoding a Craft Habitat. INTERLUDE: Exploring Indigeneity and the City. 5. Placing Indigeneity in the networks of glass-bangle making in Firozabad 6. Ecological Knowledge and Everyday Life of Vagadiya Rabaris 7. Terracotta People: Productive Tensions Between the Indigenous and the Colonial 8. Dialogue between Carpenters and Mud Masons: Cases from Telangana and Goa 9. Material Culture and Change at Chota Oda 10. Community, Spaces and Environment
