ADIVASI STUDIES: CONTOURS OF A FIELD
This panel is an attempt to bring academics and activists together in order to delineate the contours of the interdisciplinary field of Adivasi Studies.
Convenors:
· Vinita Damodaran Centre for World Environmental History, University of Sussex (Sussex, United Kingdom)
Long Abstract
Our panel is an attempt to bring academics and activists together in order to delineate the contours of the field of Adivasi Studies. This field is becoming increasingly relevant as adivasis become visible in stories of marginalization and assertion. Adivasi Studies engages with what is happening on the ground, with contemporary articulations of adivasi identity, with adivasi voices and adivasi experiences; the genesis of many of the debates around adivasis also needs to be traced to the pre-colonial and colonial pasts. The meaning attached to adivasi, we argue, has changed with historiographical shifts, disciplinary interventions and more recently, with the emergence of indigenous rights movement across the globe, the neoliberal developmental initiatives of the Indian state, and the ultra-left underground Maoist insurgency. How far has Adivasi Studies managed to establish itself as a legitimate field of enquiry into the history, experiences and politics of communities? In what ways is its turf separate from that of Dalit Studies? How do we problematize the term ‘adivasi’? How do we understand stories of dispossession, deforestation and resistance? Can the story of the Indian adivasi feed into global debates of indigeniety and indigenousness particularly in the contexts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Australia? In what ways is its turf separate from that of Dalit Studies? In this panel, we invite papers that cut across pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial time-frames, geographical spaces and disciplinary boundaries since the newly emerging field of Adivasi Studies engages with archaeology, anthropology, history, indigenous studies and developmental economics.
Presentations
- 'We celebrate the birth of girls'. Narratives of past and Adivasi women in twenty first century East Central India (Sohini Sengupta)
- Adivasi Identity and Citizenship: Celebrations in the Jungle Kingdoms of Odisha (Prasanna Kumar Nayak)
- Adivasi Studies: A Historian's Voice (Sangeeta Dasgupta)
- Against Epistemic Silence: Indigenous Resistance in Multispecies Life-Worlds (Sreyashi Ray)
- Beating Around the Bush: Land for the Paniya, Indigenous People of Wayanad in Kerala, South India (Soummya Prakash)
- Christoph von Furer Haimendorf: An Anthropologist and An Administrator. (Suresh Ramavath)
- Death of an Adivasi: Interpreting and Understanding Bikram Hembrom's Death (Arjab Roy)
- Forest conservation, Adivasis and Construction of Environmental Subjects: Case of REDD+ in Meghalaya, India (Shubhi Sharma)
- Forest king in the mirror of courtly culture (Raphaël Rousseleau)
- Hybrid Adivasi leadership patterns after PESA (Chiara Correndo)
- Land, labour, indigeneity and class: An enquiry into agrarian transition among Adivasis in India (Rajanya Bose)
- Music Videos and South Asian Indigeneities – Post/coloniality, media infrastructures and social critique by an ethnography of popular Santali songs (Markus Schleiter)
- The Adivasis of Neoliberal Kerala: Ideology, Identity and Politics (Darley Jose Kjosavik)
- The Evolution and Prospect of Tharu Adivasi Movement in Nepal (Tatsuro Fujikura)
- The question of language and charisma in Jharkhand Movement: Jaipal Singh and his After-life (Sourav Kumar Mahanta)