Belonging to the Borders: Uncertain Identities in Northeast India

Ramirez, Philippe

doi:10.4135/9788132107729.n4

Cited by 22 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Similar interethnic clan relationships have been recorded in the American Southwest (Shetler, 1996) and in Assam, where Inner Asia meets South Asia and Southeast Asia (Ramirez, 2011a, 2011b, 2014). In post-Soviet Central Asia, Azim Malikov (2013) has studied the khoja groups in their different ethnic representations.…”

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confidence: 67%

Omaha Terminologies

Schlee

2017

Cross-Cultural Research

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Omaha kinship terminologies are distributed globally to the north and south of the belt of ancient “high cultures” which stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to East and Southeast Asia in the Old World and includes parts of Mesoamerica and the Andes in the New World. This article offers an explanation for this curious distribution of Omaha terminologies. In so doing, it reviews examples of Omaha terminologies in Central Asia and on the Horn of Africa, noting their defining characteristics and those other aspects of social organization with which they are associated. In conclusion, it is suggested that a continuum of lineage-based systems, including systems with Omaha terminologies, was split into two areas of concentration, one to the north and the other to the south, as ancient “high cultures,” based on intensive agricultural production, arose among them, reverting, in the process, to terminological systems with a cognatic bias like those of the Eskimo type that are associated with urbanization and statehood.

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supporting

confidence: 67%

Omaha Terminologies

Schlee

2017

Cross-Cultural Research

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“…This article adds to such complexities as well as extrapolates Ramirez's (2007Ramirez's ( , 2011Ramirez's ( , 2014 attempt to move past the ethnic (and tribal) paradigm as being applicable to the Nagas and amongst whom it finds fertile ground.…”

Section: The Idea and Idiom Of Tribe And The Nagasmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Such clan (or perhaps phratry) belongings did not fully dissolve with the emergence of the 'idea' and 'praxis' of tribe, thus explaining how the same clan could come to 'belong' to multiple tribes simultaneously without ever completely discarding their shared belonging. Moreover, that trans-tribal clan belongings continue to be socially reproduced in the 'demotic discourse' (Baumann 1996) of villagers, as they also do in the Assam-Meghalaya borderland (Ramirez 2014) and among the Kachin in neighbouring Myanmar (Robinne 2007), must make us critically interrogate and reconsider the historical relationship between clans and tribes. 23…”

Section: Trans-tribal Clan Identitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The making of tribes

Wouters¹

2017

Contributions to Indian Sociology

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Highlighting ‘pre’, ‘trans’ and ‘new’ tribal formations amongst upland Nagas in India’s Northeast, this article formulates both a historical critique against dominant categorisations of the region’s social landscape and posits alternative ways of ‘seeing’ local patterns of kinship, identity and belonging. Drawing on ethno-historical perspectives from the Chang and Chakhesang Nagas, I illustrate the problematic cultural transitivity of the idea and idiom of ‘tribe’ which conceals the social formations that existed—and occasionally persist—before, beneath, betwixt and between categories of ‘tribe’. This realisation brings us to a dilemma which, I think, ought to be at the heart of the anthropology of Nagas and of India’s Northeast more widely—namely, how to account for the ethnographic observation that social organisation—both past and present—is based on interpersonal, village and clan networks which cut across tribal and ethnic groups with clearly permeable boundaries and yet most people maintain a view of the whole society as made up of partitioned, culturally coherent and historically immutable entities.

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Vernacular Politics in Northeast India

2022

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Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of ‘the political’ as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India’s spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its people conceive of their political lives. Fourteen chapters by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region’s political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how forms and politics of indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.

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Belonging to the Borders: Uncertain Identities in Northeast India

Cited by 22 publications

References 5 publications

Omaha Terminologies

Omaha Terminologies

The making of tribes

Vernacular Politics in Northeast India

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