Description
This book engages with notions of self and landscape as manifest in water, forest and land via historical and current perspectives in the context of indigenous communities in India. It also brings processes of identity formation among tribes in Africa and Latin America into relief. Using interconnected historical moments and representations of being, becoming and belonging, it situates the content and complexities of Adivasi self-fashioning in contemporary times, and discusses constructions of selfhood, diaspora, homeland, environment and ecology, political structures, state, marginality, development, alienation and rights.
Drawing on a range of historical sources – from recorded oral traditions and village histories to contemporary Adivasi self-narratives – the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, sociology and social anthropology, tribal and indigenous studies and politics.
Table of Contents
Preface. Abbreviations. Introduction Part I Other Representation 1. Sanskritic and Colonial Representations of Tribe Part II Self Representation 2. Meanings of Self and Landscape and Dynamics of Self-fashioning 3. Myth as History: The Representation of Self-landscape in Adivasi Creation Myths 4. Notion of Territory and the Formation of a Pre-state Political Order 5. From Itinerancy to Settled Village Life 6. Norms and Mode of Self-Governance 7. Transformation of a Hunter-forager to a Cultivator 8. Water in Adivasi Perception and the Management of Water Resources 9. Forest as a Marker of Collective Identity 10. Landscape and Fashioning of Self: The Post-independence Scenario 11. Conclusion. Glossary. Bibliography. Index
