Publisher Description

The Routledge Companion to Northeast India is a trans-disciplinary and comprehensive compendium of a vital yet under-researched region in South Asia. It provides a unique guide to prevailing themes, theories, arguments, and history of Northeast India by discussing its life-forms – human and not – languages, landscapes, and lifeways in all its diversity and difference. The companion contains authoritative entries from leading specialists from and on the region and offers clear, concise, and illuminating explanations of key themes and ideas.A hands-on, practical, and comprehensive guide to Northeast India, this companion fills a significant gap in the literature and will be an invaluable teaching, learning, and research resource for scholars and students of Northeast India Studies, South Asian and Southeast Asian societies, culture, politics, humanities, and the social sciences in general.

Author Biography

Jelle J.P. Wouters is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Sociology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. He holds an MPhil (with distinction) in social anthropology from the University of Oxford and a PhD in anthropology from North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong. Prior to joining Royal Thimphu College, he taught at Sikkim University, India, and was a visiting faculty at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany, under the 'Excellence Initiative' of the German Research Foundation. He has published about political lifeworlds, democracy and elections, insurgency and violence, kinship and identity, capitalism and resource-extraction, and social history of Northeast India.Tanka B. Subba is a retired Professor from the Department of Anthropology, North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong, India. He served as Vice-Chancellor of Sikkim University from 2012 to 2017. He has received awards like the Homi Bhabha Fellowship (Mumbai), Dr Panchanan Mitra Lectureship and R.P. Chanda Centenary Medal for 2015 (Asiatic Society, Kolkata), DAAD Guest professorship at the Free University of Berlin, Berlin, and Baden-Wuerttemberg Fellowship at the South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg. He was a member of the Academic Councils of Indira Gandhi National Tribal University, Amarkantak, and Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, and served as a member of the Advisory Boards of the National Museum of Mankind, Bhopal, Anthropological Survey of India, Kolkata, and the INTACH, New Delhi.

Table of Contents

Northeast India: An Introduction 1. Ahom Legacy 2. Animism 3. Assam–Bangladesh Border 4. Biodiversity 5. Brahmaputra 6. Buddhist Studies 7. Christian Medical Missions 8. Cities 9. Clan 10. Colonial Frontiers 11. Commons and Wildlife Conservation 12. Community Language Research 13. Conquest and Colonization 14. Cross-Border Physical Connectivity 15. Cultural Citizenship 16. Customary Law 17. Dance Cultures 18. Delimitation 19. Democracy and Elections 20. Developmentalism 21. Development-Induced Displacement 22. Domesticating Paddy 23. Dreams 24. Ethnomusicology 25. Ethno-Regionalism 26. Fifth Language Family 27. Food 28. Foothills 29. Frontier Baptists 30. Frontier Feudalism 31. Geomorphology 32. Global Wars in Colonial Frontier 33. Government Statistics 34. Healing 35. Himalaya as Method 36. Hinduism 37. Hindutva Futures 38. Human–Elephant Worlds 39. Hunting 40. Hydropower 41. Indigeneity 42. Indigenous Archaeology 43. Infrastructure 44. Inner Line 45. Insurgency 46. Inter-State Border Disputes 47. Language and Culture 48. Language and Migration 49. Language Contact and Convergence 50. Literary Traditions 51. Look East Policy 52. Materiality of Religion 53. Megalithic Traditions 54. Migration 55. Multiple Partitions 56. Multispecies Studies 57. Museums 58. Names and Naming 59. Nation 60. Oral Narratives 61. Popular Culture 62. Postcolonial Other 63. Resource Frontier 64. Sacrifice 65. Shifting Cultivation 66. Sixth Schedule 67. Species Extinction 68. Sylhet Referendum 69. Syntactic Typology 70. Tea 71. Territoriality 72. Tibeto-Burman Languages 73. Transboundary Spaces 74. Trans-Himalayan Trade 75. Travellers, Sojourners, and Wayfarers 76. Tribe 77. Upland Languages 78. Urbanisation 79. Violence 80. Women and Labour 81. Youth Activism

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