Abstract
Contrary to scholarly attempts at anthropologizing Adivasi (original dweller) in trie interests of knowledge production about and for purposes of legitimation and formulation of trie Indian states colonial construction (official representations) of trie Adivasi-other, that is, a construction that assists with the contemporary reproduction of governmentality and the disciplining of Adivasis into trans/national market-modernization imperatives (the assimilationist project of “capitalist development”), this chapter attempts to articulate Adivasi expositions pertaining to Adivasi-state development relations concerning claims to forests, land, and place. State-essentialist representations of Adivasis as “tribal others’” (referred to as Scheduled Tribes, or STs, enumerated in the Indian Constitution for purposes of amelioration) in need of special protection and rights and as peoples with singular, static, and bounded identities located in segregated spaces (referred to in the Constitution as Scheduled Areas) need to be recognized as apolitical exercise in exclusive governmentality and social control (see Kaushik Ghosh in this collection for related discussion). In other words, these representations need to be seen as statecraft designed for
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the purposes of containment and bureaucratic management of an increasingly vocal Adivasi discontent with state-market led development-dispossession (claims on forest, land, and material/cultural space) in India and around the world (Escobar, 1995; Ghosh, 2006; Kamat, 2001; Kearney, 1996; Menon & Nigam, 2007; Rajagopal, 2003);
Who wants to go to the city to join the Oriyas (dominant castes/urban outsiders) and do business and open shops and be shahari (city/ moderns) if they even give you a chance or to do labor like donkeys to get one meal? Even if they teach us, we do not want to go to the cities, as these are not the ways of the Adivasi. We cannot leave our forests (ame jangale chariparibo nahì). The forest is our second home [after the huts; meaning added]. You just come out and you have everything you need.... My friends and brothers, we are from the forest. That is why we use the small sticks of the karanja tree to brush our teeth—not tooth brushes. Our relationship to the forest is like a finger nail is to flesh (nakho koo manpho)—we cannot be separated. That is why we are Adivasi.
Kondh Adivasi elder, interview notes, village D, Orissa, India, January 2007
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Kapoor, D. (2010). Learning From adivasi (Original Dweller) Political-Ecological Expositions of Development: Claims on Forests, Land, and Place in India. In: Kapoor, D., Shizha, E. (eds) Indigenous Knowledge and Learning in Asia/Pacific and Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230111813_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230111813_2
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