Since the British colonial period anthropology has been central to policy in India. But today, while the Indian state continues to use ethnography to govern, those who were the "objects" of study are harnessing disciplinary knowledge to redefine their communities, achieve greater prosperity, and secure political rights.
In this groundbreaking study, Townsend Middleton tracks these newfound "lives" of anthropology. Offering simultaneous ethnographies of the people of Darjeeling's quest for "tribal" status and the government anthropologists handling their claims, Middleton exposes how minorities are-and are not-recognized for affirmative action and autonomy. We encounter communities putting on elaborate spectacles of sacrifice, exorcism, bows and arrows, and blood drinking to prove their "primitiveness" and "backwardness." Conversely, we see government anthropologists struggle for the ethnographic truth as communities increasingly turn academic paradigms back upon the state.
The Demands of Recognition offers a compelling look at the escalating politics of tribal recognition in India. At once ethnographic and historical, it chronicles how multicultural governance has motivated the people of Darjeeling to ethnologically redefine themselves-from Gorkha to tribal and back. But as these communities now know, not all forms of difference are legible in the eyes of the state. The Gorkhas' search for recognition has only amplified these communities' anxieties about who they are-and who they must be-if they are to attain the rights, autonomy, and belonging they desire.
Autorentext
Townsend Middleton
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This introduction lays out the book's designs for an anthropology of the ethno-contemporary. Calling on examples from the around the world, Middleton defines the ethno-contemporary as an arena of struggle-wherein communities, governments, NGO's, the United Nations, and others are putting ethnology to old and new uses to reshape the prospects of marginalized and indigenous communities at the global level. Within India, the introduction covers the rising politics of affirmative action that have attended economic liberalization since the 1990s. Examining these escalating demands, Middleton elucidates the quandaries of late liberalism. Turning to Darjeeling, he further explains how the tribal movements of the 1990s and 2000s emerged out of a violent history of subnationalist struggle. Situating Darjeeling's tribal turn at this conjuncture of global, national, and local dynamics, the introduction thereby establishes the book's analytic frames, while introducing the communities and government anthropologists who feature throughout its chapters.
Chapter 1 explores the shifting terms-and energies-of identity and its politics. Blending historical and ethnographic analysis, the discussion moves from the colonial period to the bleeding-edge of subnationalism today to trace the unsettling histories, anxieties, and desires that animate life and politics at India's margins. The analysis reveals the deep-seated anxieties over belonging-what Middleton calls anxious belongings-that fuel Darjeeling's movements for recognition and autonomy. Through time, these anxieties over being-in and being-of India have made for a categorically searching politics, where the terms change but the conditions of exclusion remain troublingly the same. Historicizing the recent shift from Gorkha to tribal politics, Chapter 1 unearths the conditions driving communities into such intermittently violent and ethnological relations with the state and themselves. Doing so, it develops the tribal turn as a case study of the ethno-contemporary's global contours and intensely local forms.
Chapter 2 examines the origins of ethnological governmentality in India, focusing on the colonial history of tribal recognition. It uses ethnographic material to launch an historical investigation of how particular ethno-logics-in this case, the binary of castes vs. tribes-become fixtures of state policy and the popular imagination. Middleton examines ethnology's checkered history in India to offer a new reading of 'colonialism and its forms of knowledge'. Despite the conspicuous coloniality of the category tribe, tribal recognition was seldom stable. Through archival readings, Middleton shows it was not epistemic hubris, but rather uncertainty that drove the know-and-rule rationalities of the British. Moving from history to the present-day, he illustrates how colonial knowledge and its uncertainties have come to shape the prospects of millions in postcolonial era-including the people of Darjeeling. This analysis consequently reveals the often-messy pasts that undergird the ethnologically affected present.
Chapter 3 argues tribal recognition to be a postcolonial problem demanding postcolonial answers. After independence, tribal classification assumed a form and certainty eclipsing its colonial antecedents. Turning attention to these dynamics of postcolonial knowledge, power, and policy, Middleton asks how a troubled colonial category became a centerpiece of postcolonial social justice. The analysis moves from B.R. Ambedkar and the Constituent Assembly Debates of the 1940s, through decolonization, and into the makings of India's multicultural democracy. It chronicles the development of a markedly Hindu-centric liberalism that continues to structure affirmative action and the management of diversity across the subcontinent. With one eye on the postcolonial state and the other on Darjeeling's aspiring tribes, Middleton documents the real-life impacts of these decidedly postcolonial forms of knowledge and power.
Chapter 4 offers an ethnography of state ethnography itself. The analysis graphically portrays an Ethnographic Survey in 2006, wherein the people of Darjeeling attempted to prove their tribal identity to the anthropologists of the Indian government. The narrative takes the reader into the 'emergency meetings' and eleventh-hour preparations of the communities under investigation, before shifting to the spectacular events of the survey itself. Revealing the competing ethnological tactics of anthropologists and communities alike, Middleton shows the survey to be an interface in every sense of the word. While the event extended a long history of ethnological governmentality, it also signaled new developments on the horizons of ethnic becoming. Framing the survey, then, as a signature moment of the ethno-contemporary, this chapter offers a fundamental rethinking of the proverbial encounter of 'anthropologists and tribes'.
Chapter 5 charts the inner-workings of today's ethnographic state. Through an anthropology of bureaucracy, the chapter follows government anthropologists as they produce and defend their soft science in the hard places of late liberal governance. Investigating affirmative action from the inside-out, Middleton exposes the impossible demands placed upon these civil servants. On the one hand are communities in need; on the other is an under-resourced affirmative action system, crosscut by contending political agendas and technocratic persuasions. Exploring the quandaries of government anthropologists and their knowledge, this ch…