作者简介
Alpa Shah is Professor in Anthropology at LSE.
内容简介
In the Shadows of the State suggests that well-meaning indigenous rights and development cl ai ms and interventions may misrepresent and hurt the very people they seek to help. It is a powerful critique based on extensive ethnographic research in Jharkhand, a state in eastern India offi cia lly created in 2000. While the realization of an independent Jharkhand was the culmination of many years of local, regional, and transnational activism for the rights of the region's culturally auto nomous indigenous people, Alpa Shah argues that the activism unintentionally further marginalizes the region's poorest people. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in Jharkhand, she follows the everyday live s of some of the poorest villagers as they chase away pro tected wild elephants, try to cut down the forests they allegedly live in harmony with, maintain a healthy scepticism about the revival of the indigenous governance system, and seek to avoid the initial spread of an armed revolution of Maoist guerrillas who claim to represent them. Juxtaposing these experiences with the accounts of the village elites and the rhetoric of the urban indigenous-rights activists, Shah reveals a class dimension to the indigenous-rights movement, one easily lost in the cultural-based identity politics that the movement produces. In the Shadows of the State brings together ethnographic and theoretical analyses to show that the local use of global discourses of indigeneity often re info rces a class system that harms the poorest people.
Alpa Shah is Professor in Anthropology at LSE.
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