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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.
List 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
About the author
Asoka Kumar Sen taught history at Tata College, Chaibasa, West Singhbhum, Jharkhand, and retired as a professor (1965-2002). He is presently an independent researcher of tribal history and editor of the
Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies. He was awarded a brief fellowship at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, New Delhi, India. He also worked as a researcher for Sussex University, UK, on the British Academy project entitled 'The East India Company and the Natural World: Environment, Innovation and Ideas at the Core of the British Empire'
. His published works include
The Educated Middle Class and Indian Nationalism (1988);
Bengali Intelligentsia and Popular Uprisings 1855-73 (1992);
Wilkinson's Rules, Context, Content and Ramifications (edited, 1999);
Representing Tribe: The Ho of Singhbhum during Colonial Rule (2011); and
From Village Elder to British Judge: Custom, Customary Law and Tribal Society (2012).
Summary
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.
Additional text
‘The very real contribution of this book is bringing out the current adivasi dilemma between being and becoming, showing how these discursive phenomena are deeply embedded in changing landscapes . . . This book will be a lasting resource for anyone interested in how adivasi history as well as identity must be read and understood—picking a discerning route through colonial records, oral histories and contemporary political debates.’
Nandini Sundar, Contributions to Indian Sociology 53, 3 (2019): 447–49
