Reworking Culture: Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in Garo Hills, North East India

Description

Reworking Culture: Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in Garo Hills, North-East India provides intimate insights into the lives of Garo hill farmers, and the challenges they face in day-to-day life. Focusing on the ongoing reinterpretation of traditions, or customs, the book reveals the inadequacy of the all too often assumed characterization of upland societies as culturally homogenous, internally cohesive, and unchanging. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book focuses on a rural area where land constitutes the most important resource, and where a substantial number of people practise traditional Garo animism. The book explores how people create and continually reinterpret the multiple relationships that connect them as a community, to the spirits, and to the land. These relationships are embedded in normative frameworks that call for compliance, yet leave room for ambiguity and negotiation. Far from being immutable, these need to be constantly expressed, (re-)interpreted, and enacted. The book thus shows how Garo traditions, referred to as niam, are continuously revised and reworked in response to new economic and political opportunities, as well as to changes in the ontological landscape.

About the Author:

Erik de Maaker is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His research interests include place making, relatedness, religion, heritage, materiality, visuality, and the life cycle. Erik is also a visual anthropologist. His publications include the co-edited Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia (Routledge 2019); and Unequal land Relations in North East India: Custom, Gender and the Market (NESRC 2020) as well as Trans-Himalayan Environmental Humanities: Symbiotic Indigeneity and the Animist Earth (Routledge, 2021). He is a founding member of the Asian Borderlands Research Network.

Reviews

“Reworking Culture is a refreshing addition to the ever-growing literature on studies of Northeast India. It represents an important departure from existing studies in many ways.” 

“Reworking Culture is a study of the Garos of Northeast India. Yet its scope goes far beyond. (…) Anyone interested in the study of tribes and ethnographic fieldwork will find this book enriching. It offers many insights that an exemplary and sustained ethnographer can generate where others might fail."

Virginius Xaxa, Visiting Professor, Institute for Human Development, New Delhi, India

“(Reworking Culture) is an intimate ethnographic portrait of everyday social relations and the rules governing them in the West Garo Hills of Northeast India.”

“the strength of de Maaker’s monograph lies in his painstaking, empathetic reconstruction of the inner logics animating Garo village life over 20 years of fieldwork. He accomplishes this immense task without resorting to high theory, tortuous prose, or arcane jargon.”

“Erik de Maaker has taken a patient approach of listening to and observing his interlocutors over two decades of fieldwork in and around the Garo village of Sadolpara, close to the Indo– Bangladesh border. In de Maaker’s nuanced portrayal of Garo village life, everyday sociality, governed by malleable norms (niam) between women and men of different matrilineal clans, lies at the heart of the community and their relationship with their lived environment. Niam is, therefore, far from the archaic, unchanging body of customary law, but as modern as states and markets that shape the political and economic lives of Garos today.”  Uday Chandra (Georgetown University Qatar), Contributions to Indian Sociology

 ”In (a) mutual web of duties, obligations, rights, and privileges, de Maaker explains, Garo personhood is shaped by relationality in more ways than one.”

“Garos are not just, however, defined with respect to each other. They are also defined by their relationship to spirits inside the household and in the jungle, and by extension, by shifting dynamics between swidden and fixed-field agriculture. Even Christian Garos, who do not profess belief in spirits, see nature’s bounty as a gift from God or Jesus, offering a share of their agricultural produce to the church. Much like spirits, the dead exert considerable influence on the ways of the living, whether as ghosts or as reincarnated beings. (…) The community of the living (…) is renewed and reworked at every funeral and in relation to the dead. The niam of funerals is inherently flexible to adapt to the empirical specificities of households, clans, and circumstances as they arise.”

Richard Kamei (RTC Bhutan), EPW

“this study de-construct the essentialist exoticisation of indigenous people. It looks into what constitutes indigeneity, while bringing forth the agency of indigenous peoples”

“(this book deals with) questions of rights, agency, and choices in response to modernity and (…) adds to the current debate on indigeneity”

“What stands out in the book is the centrality of the belief in the spirits, as to how it binds and defines the relationships among people and their natural surroundings.”

Table of contents

Table of contents

Contents

Preface/Acknowledgements
Transliteration, Pronunciation, and Quotation
Glossary of Terms
List of Figures

I Customizing Culture?
1.1 Locating Garo Culture
1.2 Creating Community
1.3 Continuing Conversations
1.4 Structure of the Book

II Frames, Labels, Locations
2.1 Spatial Divides
2.2 Garo Conversions
2.3 Becoming Citizens
2.4 Constituting 'Tribe'
2.5 Ethnic Politics, Militancy, and the Demand for Statehood

III Housing Matters
3.1 Jiji's Plight
3.2 Modelling Relatedness
3.3 Living with Houses
3.4 The Birth of a House
3.5 Bracing for Social Pressure?
3.6 Houses of Relatedness

IV Niam, Houses and Land
4.1 It would be good if he died!
4.2 Practising Niam
4.3 Living with the Spirits
4.4 Occupying the Land
4.5 Landed Responsibilities and Religious Stature
4.6 Negotiating the Growth of the Crops

V Engaging the Dead
5.1 The Religiosity of Funerals
5.2 Souls and their Wanderings
5.3 Anticipating Death
5.4 Death's Demands
5.5 Engaging Gifts
5.6 Acknowledging the Source
5.7 Vouching to Slaughter a Cow
5.8 Putrefaction and Presence
5.9 Separating, Distancing, and Reconnecting

VI Claiming Relationships, Spaces, and Resources
6.1 Replacing Baka
6.2 Constituting Mutuality
6.3 Showing Commitment, Acknowledging Debt
6.4 Rural Workers, Rural Entrepreneurs
6.5 Accessing Swidden
6.6 From Rotating Swiddens to Permanent Occupation
6.7 Living on the Land
VII Customizing Traditions
7.1 The State as a Resource
7.2 Reinterpreting Status, Wealth, and Prestige
7.3 Polarities and Convergences

VIII The Modernity of Garo Niam
8.1 Cherishing Tradition
8.2 How Niam Facilitates Social Change
8.3 Reworking Niam