A pioneering anthropologist who closely studied little-known Indian tribes, Verrier Elwin's writings provide insight into Indian tribal life, art, and culture. The essays in this collection discuss his experiences in India, Indian tribes, Muria and their ghotul, Maria murder and suicide, art, folksongs, myths, and Nagaland. Nineteen black and white photographs, the majority taken by Elwin, are also included.
This book sheds a positive light on the prevalence of love for humankind in the form of philanthropy. All around our globe, people rich and poor, urban and rural, religious and non-religious, in “advanced” and “developing” societies alike, perform acts of philanthropy, organizationally embedded and guided by philanthropic values and norms. This book, therefore, attempts to reach a truly international audience, because philanthropy is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. Besides the growing public interest across the world, more and more academic disciplines are taking an interest in philanthropy, each scrutinizing philanthropy from their own disciplinary perspective and with a particular focus. As a result, however, the overall picture has rather faded into the background. In line with cultural anthropologists, the book presents philanthropy as a universal societal system, differently arranged in each society, that deserves a distinctive academic discipline: the science of philanthropology.
A pioneering anthropologist who closely studied little-known Indian tribes, Verrier Elwin's writings provide insight into Indian tribal life, art, and culture. The essays in this collection discuss his experiences in India, Indian tribes, Muria and their ghotul, Maria murder and suicide, art, folksongs, myths, and Nagaland. Nineteen black and white photographs, the majority taken by Elwin, are also included.
The wisdom of tribal peoples has often been overlooked, both within the church and outside of it. However as the ideologies of consumerism, free market individualism, and nationalism grow more and more dominant across the globe, with devastating implications for our planet’s shared future, it has become ever more urgent to make space for voices from the margins – voices offering alternative frameworks for understanding the nature of existence, spirituality, and what it means to be human. This book draws together contributors from diverse tribal and denominational backgrounds to reflect on the future of Christianity in Northeast India, a region rich in ancient myths, oral traditions, and a vibrant awareness of both the spiritual realm and the embeddedness of humans within creation. Joining a wider conversation regarding the integration of Christianity and primal traditions, the authors wrestle with crucial questions surrounding identity and the challenges of contextualizing the gospel in relation to their own languages, cultures, and traditions. Looking both backwards and forwards, they provide insight into the history of Christianity in tribal contexts, while exploring the vital significance of recovering and transmitting indigenous knowledge and the profound perspective it offers the church into the significance of Christ and his gospel.
The essays are written in the context of the so-called tribal areas of the north-eastern region of India. The base data in most cases have however been collected from Meghalaya, the Khasi-Jaintia Hills in particular, my primary research universe. However, the ethnic groups living in the mountainous terrain of India’s north-east, show a characteristic unity, despite linguistic and cultural diversities, that of being in a state of social format called ‘tribal’ facing similar problems of static life, economy and under-development. Added to this are the tensions generated in recent years when education and some waves of development reached the region and tribal self-governing states in the Indian Union came in to being. Consequently, new issues have come into the fore–the issues relating to self-assertion, retention of the age-old cultural identity, the crisis of adjustment between tradition and modernity, and above all, the tensions of a change-over from the tranquil folklife to modern hurly-burly including those of the fast moving world in the days of globalization. Consequently, there also appeared a concern with folklore, the search for a ‘lore’ of essential core, to write a new history. Khasi Jaintia Oral Texts Folklore and Development Antithetic NorthEast India Mentalities,The Folklife and the Socio Psychologial Issues of Development Identity Narrative, Ritual and Historical Jaintia Religion and Identity Khasi Orality Khasi-Jaintia Genre of Folklore The Nongkrem Dances of Khasi Meghalaya Hills, Dales and Groves Folk, Court, Popular Hermeneutics of Religious Practices Verrier Elwin North-East Frontier
Between Ethnography and Fiction brings together essays by sixteen scholars of various disciplines to re-examine the work of Verrier Elwin in the fields of tribal literature, tribe and non-tribe relationship, tribal development policies, missionaries and conversion, myths and legends, art and craft, etc. Elwin is undoubtedly one of the most controversial as well as influential anthropologists of the twentieth century. The essays included here are therefore both appreciative and critical.
This book provides a unique understanding of the concept and practice of seva (service) in modern India. It examines social reform, key ameliorative programmes, seva organisations, nationalist politics and colonial anthropology to show the critical linkages between caste politics, tribal welfare and capitalist development. Drawing upon archival research and field interviews, the author establishes a critical dialogue with both historiography and ethnography. Further, he explores how the works of Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Gokhale, and others functioned in the political discourses and practices of their time. This lucid and comprehensive study will interest scholars and researchers in political theory, modern Indian history, sociology and social anthropology, Dalit and tribal studies, and cultural studies.
