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"This book considers three questions about understanding the past. How can we rethink human histories by including animals and plants? How can we overcome nationally territorialised narratives? And how can we balance academic history-writing and indigenous understandings of history? This is a tentative foray into the connections between these questions. The authors explore them for a large area that historians seldom choose as their unit of inquiry. The "Eastern Himalayan Triangle" (elaborated further in the abstract that follows) includes both uplands and lowlands and is the meeting point of three global biodiversity hotspots, and connects India and China across Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan. They treat the "Triangle" as a multispecies site in which human histories have always been utterly intertwined with plant and animal histories. The main objective is to foreground that history is co-created - it is always interspecies history - but that its contours are locally specific. The book presents a wealth of environmental specificities in which human history is embedded. The multispecies complexities encountered require the authors to recalibrate the conventions of academic history-writing and they do so by advancing new spatial and temporal imaginations - pushing beyond both methodological nationalism and traditional periodisation - and carefully considering local life-worlds and multispecies cosmologies"--
List of contents
List of Maps; List of Plates; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. The Deep Past: 1. An Epic Crash; 2. Human Beginnings; 3. Changing the Environment; 4. Livelihoods; Part II. Cosmologies: 5. Stories of Human Origins; 6. Human-animal Histories; 7. Human-plant Histories; Part III. More-Than-Human Histories: 8. Cultural geographies; 9. Exploiting Natural Resources; 10. Dealing with Environmental Decay; 11. The Elephant Strikes Back; Conclusion; Bibliography; Copyrights and Sources; Index.
About the author
Joy L. K. Pachuau is a historian and anthropologist with an interest in Northeast India, gender studies, and the history of Christianity in Asia. Her recent works include Landscape, Culture and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India (2019, ed. with Neeladri Bhattacharya), Christianity in India: Issues of Culture, Power and Knowledge (2016, ed. with Tanika Sarkar et al.). She was awarded the Sneh Mahajan Prize for the best book in modern Indian history for 2012–14 by the Indian History Congress for her monograph Being Mizo, Identity and Belonging in Northeast India, 2014.Willem van Schendel works in the fields of history, anthropology, and sociology of Asia. Recent books include: The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (2015, with Joy L.K. Pachuau); A History of Bangladesh (new edition, 2020); and Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces: Histories of Networking and Border Crossing (2022, ed. with Gunnel Cederlöf). His publications can be found at uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel.
Summary
Entangled Lives is a case study in environmental history, multispecies history, more-than-human history, posthumanism, and environmental humanities. Its main objective is to foreground that history is co-created, but that its contours are locally specific.
Foreword
It is a case study in environmental history, multispecies history, more-than-human history, posthumanism, and environmental humanities.
