An investigation into the category of tribes in South Asia. It focuses on one so-called tribal community, the Garos of Bangladesh. It deals with the evolution of Garo identity/ethnicity and with the progressive making of cultural characteristics that support a sense of Garo-ness, in the context of the complex historical developments.

Indigenous knowledge is regarded as undocumented cultural, local, traditional, and community knowledge produced and owned by local people in their specific communities. It is mainly preserved in the memories of elders and shared or passed on from generation to generation through oral communication, traditional practices, and demonstrations. This irreplaceable resource may be lost forever as a direct result of the pressures of modernization, colonization, and globalization. Concern over the loss of Indigenous knowledge has thus raised a need for the preservation and documentation of this knowledge in digital formats. Digital Preservation and Documentation of Global Indigenous Knowledge Systems determines how Indigenous knowledge can be documented and digitally preserved to benefit Indigenous knowledge owners and their communities and be accessible for future generations. The book provides the best practices, innovative strategies, theoretical and conceptual frameworks, and empirical research findings regarding the digital preservation and documentation of Indigenous knowledge systems worldwide. Covering topics such as digital media platforms, educational management, and knowledge systems, this premier reference source is a valuable and useful tool for students, information professionals, knowledge managers, records managers, Indigenous knowledge owners, Indigenous community leaders, librarians, archivists, computer scientists, information technology specialists, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

This book explores the transitions in the adivasi identity as well as in the political representation of adivasi communities in Bangladesh. It traces the use of categories such as “primitive”, “tribe”, and “adivasi” in post-colonial Bangladesh, both in the political discourse and in everyday life. The volume studies the history of these essentialized categories used for indigenous communities within the hierarchies of power and identity. It also analyses the diverse articulations of indigeneity through ethnographic narratives, exploring the formations of newer traditions and identity. The author highlights the persistence of the terms “simple” and “primitive” in contemporary discourses while also sharing examples of complex mediations and appropriation of these categories by adivasi groups in Bangladesh. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of sociology, social ethnography, social and cultural anthropology, indigenous studies, exclusion studies, development studies, political sociology, and South Asian studies.

In this eloquent plea for compassion and respect for all species, journalist and gardener Nancy Lawson describes why and how to welcome wildlife to our backyards. Through engaging anecdotes and inspired advice, profiles of home gardeners throughout the country, and interviews with scientists and horticulturalists, Lawson applies the broader lessons of ecology to our own outdoor spaces. Detailed chapters address planting for wildlife by choosing native species; providing habitats that shelter baby animals, as well as birds, bees, and butterflies; creating safe zones in the garden; cohabiting with creatures often regarded as pests; letting nature be your garden designer; and encouraging natural processes and evolution in the garden. The Humane Gardener fills a unique niche in describing simple principles for both attracting wildlife and peacefully resolving conflicts with all the creatures that share our world.

Papers presented at the Conference on Memory and the Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts, held in July 2005.

Food and eating has always been endowed with meanings. It is one of the most visible and important symbols of identity and difference, uniting the members of a community and segregating them from other communities. This inclusion and exclusion can be observed not only in what they eat or what they are known to eat, but also how they eat, how they prepare and serve their food, and what happens after food is taken. The study of food politics and questions of identity and difference can, therefore, be a means of understanding the underlying social relations in any culture and its quiescent philosophy. This ethnographic work discusses the politics inherent in food among the Garos of Assam (India) and Bangladesh. In these two areas, they live as a minority, and with and in the peripheries of a dominant non-Garo culture. Thus, this book examines the ways in which Garos conceptualize themselves and the ‘other’ world through the microcosm of food – the most important need of all. It discusses, among other topics, how the concepts of Garo food versus non-Garo food find fruition in social reality and collective memory, as an identity marker.

The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia. Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context. The handbook reveals both regional commonalities and diversities, generalities and specificities, and a broad orientation to key themes in the region. An indispensable reference work, this handbook fills a significant gap in the literature and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in Highland Asia, Zomia Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Conceptual History and Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies and South Asian Studies as well as Asian Studies in general.

'The Bengal Borderland' constitutes the epicentre of the partition of British India. Yet while the forging of international borders between India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma (the 'Bengal Borderland') has been a core theme in Partition studies, these crucial borderlands have, remarkably, been largely ignored by historians.

Humorous Wit is a new compilation of quotations in their most humoristic form. There are over 15,000 of these taken from various parts of the world, with over 1,200 of them translated into English for the first time. This book features 5,000 authors from every corner of the globe, covering a period starting before classical antiquity, when man first started to record his thoughts, to modern times, enriching the cultural heritage. This does not in any way mean that the caveman was less humorous, but the richness of the environment we live in today and the variety of subject matter contribute considerably to a refined sense of humour. Moreover, considering that chimps and other primates also possess the ability to laugh, humour may have been around longer than the human race : )

This book is a collection of ethnographies of transnational migration and border crossings in Asia. Interdisciplinary in scope, it addresses issues of mobility and Diaspora from various vantage points. Unique to this volume is an emphasis of studying globalisation from below, privileging the narratives and views of “people on the move” – or the transnational underclass – and their sense of belonging to places and communities. The collection is further distinguished by its focus on the sources of authority and the social configurations that are created in the intersections between legality and illegality across Asia. Though previous studies on transnational flows have deconstructed the notion of nation-states as having fixed political boundaries, and have engaged in spaces beyond the nation-states, seldom has an entire region, Asia, been privileged in one integrated volume. We emphasize hitherto marginalized debates that have significant policy relevance. Other than a serious academic interest from lecturers and students, we are confident that book will be of significant interest for development practitioners and NGOs.