Global Indigenous Studies Resources

The uneasy alliance of tribal art and the museum movement As India consolidates an aggressive model of economic development, indigenous tribal people known as adivasis continue to be overrepresented among the country?s poor. Adivasis make up more than eight hundred communities in India, with a total population of more than a hundred million people who speak more than three hundred different languages. Although their historical presence is acknowledged by the state and they are lauded as a part of India?s ethnic identity today, their poverty has been compounded by the suppression of their cultural heritage and lifestyle. In Adivasi Art and Activism, Alice Tilche draws on anthropological fieldwork conducted in rural western India to chart changes in adivasi aesthetics, home life, attire, food, and ideas of religiosity that have emerged from negotiation with the homogenizing forces of Hinduization, development, and globalization in the twenty-first century. She documents curatorial projects located not only in museums and art institutions, but in the realms of the home, the body, and the landscape. Adivasi Art and Activism raises vital questions about preservation and curation of indigenous material and provides an astute critique of the aesthetics and politics of Hindu nationalism.

This volume examines the processes and impacts of exclusion on the Adivasis (tribal or indigenous people) in India and what repercussions these have for their constitutional rights. The chapters explore a wide range of issues connected to the idea of exclusion -- land and forest resources, habitats and livelihoods, health and disease management, gender relations, language and schooling, water resources, poverty, governance, markets and technology, and development challenges -- through case studies from different parts of the country. The book argues that any laws intended to safeguard the fundamental rights of Adivasis must acknowledge the fact that their diverse and complex identities are not homogenous, and that uniform laws have failed to address their systemic marginalisation since the colonial era. This work appeals for a serious and meaningful political intervention towards tribal development. The volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of tribal and Third World studies, sociology and social anthropology, exclusion studies and development studies.

The seventh volume in the ambitious Rethinking India series, Being Adivasi: Existence, Entitlements, Exclusion looks at the process of development and how it clashes with the rights of the Adivasis. The volume serves not as an academic exercise but, in addressing the larger readership, as a prelude to the change that will bring to the Adivasis some measure of their rights as citizens of a democratic country. The essays in the volume address the persistent problems faced by the Adivasis and Denotified Tribes, from questions of their distinct identity to land alienation, indebtedness and displacement from ancestral lands. Persistent problems faced by the Adivasis-land alienation, indebtedness, vanishing minor forest products from government forests and displacement from their ancestral lands-led to their impoverishment. The Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act and the Forest Land Rights Act (FRA) enacted by the previous governments were decisive steps towards the empowerment of the Adivasis. However, at present, the implementation of these provisions has taken a back seat. This volume of the Rethinking India series presents the views of the Adivasis and the Denotified Communities on the process of development and its clash with their rights.

For readers of Caste, the coming-of-age story of a Dalit individual that illuminates systemic injustice in India and its growing impact on US society "A moving personal story and a useful educational examination of persistent discrimination"-Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puruskar, 2020 Born into a "formerly untouchable manual-scavenging family in small-town India," Yashica Dutt was taught from a young age to not appear "Dalit looking." Although prejudice against Dalits, who compose 25% of the population, has been illegal since 1950, caste-ism in India is alive and well. Blending her personal history with extensive research and reporting, Dutt provides an incriminating analysis of caste's influence in India over everything from entertainment to judicial systems and how this discrimination has carried over to US institutions. Dutt traces how colonial British forces exploited and perpetuated a centuries-old caste system, how Gandhi could have been more forceful in combatting prejudice, and the role played by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, whom Isabel Wilkerson called "the MLK of India's caste issues" in her book Caste. Alongside her analysis, Dutt interweaves personal stories of learning to speak without a regional accent growing up and desperately using medicinal packs to try to lighten her skin. Published in India in 2019 to acclaim, this expanded edition includes 2 new chapters covering how the caste system traveled to the US, its history here, and the continuation of bias by South Asian communities in professional sectors. Amid growing conversations about caste discrimination prompting US institutions including Harvard University, Brandeis University, the University of California system, and the NAACP to add caste as a protected category to their policies, Dutt's work sheds essential light on the significant influence caste-ism has across many aspects of US society. Raw and affecting, Coming Out as Dalitbrings a new audience of readers into a crucial conversation about embracing Dalit identity, offering a way to change the way people think about caste in their own communities and beyond.

Photo book documenting Dalit protests in Nepal.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the academic journeys of Dalit students and their lived experiences of systemic exclusion in Indian higher education. It explains their educational journeys beyond caste-based discrimination, specifically analyzing the power dynamics, resilience, and resistance in their institutional life. The volume, -- Describes institutional culture, practices and contexts that contribute to a negative environment for Dalit students, and what changes would be required to create a positive campus climate for them; -- Provides a comparative analysis with the United States higher education contexts while drawing theoretical frameworks from critical race theory in educational settings, social reproduction theory and diversity research; -- Discusses the significance of developing anti-casteist, democratic and inclusive university spaces in India, with an emphasis on how Indian university campuses can be transformed through diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives and indispensable support programs to assist Dalit and other vulnerable students; Nuanced and accessible, this book will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers of education, higher education, sociology, exclusion studies, and Dalit studies. It will also be useful for policymakers, social activists, NGOs, research centres and those working in the areas of higher education, reservations, public policy, caste, anti-caste and exclusion studies.

This book is a fierce argument against social and caste discrimination in India, especially untouchability and emphatic call for social justice. Written by a first-generation Kannada Dalit writer, the book provides an insider's view of caste discrimination as the author has lived through and experienced it. It traces the roots of present-day activism against caste discrimination, the influence of Ambedkar, the rise of Hindutva, and the role of Dalit literatures in shaping discourses around caste in India. An invigorating collection of essays and speeches by Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of discrimination, literature, politics and political philosophy, exclusion studies, race, social justice, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.

This book explores the transitions in the adivasi identity as well as in the political representation of adivasi communities in Bangladesh. It traces the use of categories such as "primitive", "tribe", and "adivasi" in post-colonial Bangladesh, both in the political discourse and in everyday life. The volume studies the history of these essentialized categories used for indigenous communities within the hierarchies of power and identity. It also analyses the diverse articulations of indigeneity through ethnographic narratives, exploring the formations of newer traditions and identity. The author highlights the persistence of the terms "simple" and "primitive" in contemporary discourses while also sharing examples of complex mediations and appropriation of these categories by adivasi groups in Bangladesh. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of sociology, social ethnography, social and cultural anthropology, indigenous studies, exclusion studies, development studies, political sociology, and South Asian studies.

The concept of "tribe" in India is a beleaguered one, and shares overlapping definitions with a number of nomenclatures - "adivasis", "indigenous people", and even "Scheduled Tribes". For centuries, over widely dispersed territories, groups of communities were subjected to very similar inimical processes that led to their destitution.First Citizens engages with the political and historical processes which go into the making of differential identities and adoption of specific labels by communities, and explores a number of critical issues confronting this extremely vulnerable section of Indian society. The essays document the diverse causes for migrations of India's "tribal" populations, notably women, and their absorption into both rural and urban informal economies; the multi-layered aggression of "development" policies impinging on the lives of those inhabiting mineral-rich habitats; the violent interface between politicized forest dwellers and the Indian state; the theory and practice behind the Forest Rights Act and the environmentalists' dilemma; and state legislation which may be enabling or otherwise for forest-based communities.Highlighting these communities' attempts to organize a broad-based social movement to challenge ecologically destructive and non-inclusive economic policies, this volume chronicles their struggle to claim a common identity as Indian citizens.

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.

A history of the historyless, and the marginalization of adivasi voices.A History of Adivasi Women in Post-Independence Eastern India is a path-breaking book that explores the current status of adivasi women in the four states of eastern India with high percentages of adivasis--Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal.  Debasree De engages with the recent paradigm of 'development and displacement' and adivasi women's marginalization and cultural silencing. The findings in the book are based on extensive field surveys in teagardens, stone crushing sites, brick kilns and construction industries. Further, the book provides new material on the extremist villages of Jangal Mahal, Koraput, Malkangiri and Niyamgiri Hills.  Linking tribe and gender, the author elaborates how forest economy is women's economy; forcible eviction by multinationals for new industries has led to severe displacement and poverty, apart from intensification of witch hunting and trafficking of girls.

Since the 1990s, the Indigenous movement worldwide has become increasingly relevant to research in India, re-shaping the terms of engagement with Adivasi (Indigenous/tribal) peoples and their pasts. This book responds to the growing need for an inter-disciplinary re-assessment of Tribal studies in postcolonial India and defines a new agenda for Adivasi studies. It considers the existing conceptual and historical parameters of Tribal studies, as a means of addressing new approaches to histories of de-colonization and patterns of identity-formation that have become visible since national independence. Contributors address a number of important concerns, including the meaning of Indigenous studies in the context of globalised academic and political imaginaries, and the possibilities and pitfalls of constructions of indigeneity as both a foundational and a relational concept. A series of short editorial essays provide theoretical clarity to issues of representation, resistance, agency, recognition and marginality. The book is an essential read for students and scholars of Indian Sociology, Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies and Indigenous studies.

Created in 2000 following a long-standing regional movement, Jharkhand-the land of forests-represents an important experiment in regional autonomy and self-determination for indigenous communities in a postcolonial democracy. Over two decades, Jharkhand has experienced a volatile political environment as competing political groups have mobilised indigenous subaltern communities for different ends. In Reclaiming Indigeneity and Democracy in India's Jharkhand, Ipshita Basu contributes to scholarship on critical social justice and indigeneity by highlighting 'relations of justification' as a central feature of group-based claims-making for social groups identifying with indigeneity in diverse ways. Specifically, the book focuses on reclaiming political recognition for Adivasis within the contemporary dynamics of majoritarian populism and the market economy. Uniting perspectives from philosophy (social justice), politics (democracy and public reasoning), and culture studies (identity), and based on ethnographic and archival research, the author indicates that when 'relations' are at the epicentre of claims-making, expressive attachments determine political activism over the instrumental choices that groups are compelled to make in the context of large power differentials. This book is a timely account of indigenous politics and is an attempt to foreground the complex 'political nature' of social justice claims-making in a democracy such as India.

A penetrating anthropological inquiry into remote areas as understood by their inhabitants and by the outsiders who encounter them This groundbreaking book is the first sustained anthropological inquiry into the idea of remote areas. Shafqat Hussain examines the surprisingly diverse ways the people of Hunza, a remote independent state in Pakistan, have been viewed by outsiders over the past century. He also explores the Hunza people's perceptions of British colonialists, Pakistani state officials, modern-day Westerners, and others, and how the local people used their remote status strategically, ensuring their own interests were served as they engaged with the outside world.

Recounting the story of the Oraons and Tana Bhagats of Chhotanagpur in the present-day state of Jharkhand, this book questions postcolonial understandings of the category of 'tribe' and unravels the threads of a hierarchical adivasi world. It unpacks colonial ethnography, missionary narratives, and anthropological writings; explores issues of adivasi identity and resistance; and demonstrates how contemporary adivasi protest draws upon memories of the past. Dasgupta argues that nineteenth and early twentieth-century ideas of 'tribe' were not abstract imaginaries but structured colonial interventions. These affected the shaping of customary rights; the understanding of the rural world; and the perception of customs and practices. She analyses the ways in which Tana Bhagats questioned hierarchies among the Oraons; opposed landlords, moneylenders, and the colonial state; and engaged with Gandhi and the Congress. Dasgupta delineates how Tanas allude to their diverse experiences and distinctive memories to negotiate with the sarkar even today. Using colonial archives, oral narratives, and contemporary pamphlets, this book examines the contending 'truths' produced around adivasi protest, and the complex interplay between the past and the present, the oral and the written.

The Violence of Recognition offers an unprecedented firsthand account of the operations of Hindu nationalists and their role in sparking the largest incident of anti-Christian violence in India's history. Through vivid ethnographic storytelling, Pinky Hota explores the roots of ethnonationalist conflict between two historically marginalized groups-the Kandha, who are Adivasi (tribal people considered indigenous in India), and the Paana, a community of Christian Dalits (previously referred to as "untouchables"). Hota documents how Hindutva mobilization led to large-scale violence, culminating in attacks against many thousands of Paana Dalits in the district of Kandhamal in 2008.Bringing indigenous studies as well as race and ethnic studies into conversation with Dalit studies, Hota shows that, despite attempts to frame these ethnonationalist tensions as an indigenous population's resistance against disenfranchisement, Kandha hostility against the Paana must be understood as anti-Christian, anti-Dalit violence animated by racial capitalism. Hota's analysis of caste in relation to race and religion details how Hindu nationalists exploit the singular and exclusionary legal recognition of Adivasis and the putatively liberatory, anti-capitalist discourse of indigeneity in order to justify continued oppression of Dalits-particularly those such as the Paana. Because the Paana lost their legal protection as recognized minorities (Scheduled Caste) upon conversion to Christianity, they struggle for recognition within the Indian state's classificatory scheme. Within the framework of recognition, Hota shows, indigeneity works as a political technology that reproduces the political, economic, and cultural exclusion of landless marginalized groups such as Dalits. The Violence of Recognition reveals the violent implications of minority recognition in creating and maintaining hierarchies of racial capitalism.