Focussing On Nomadic Societies In The Region, This Reader Brings Together Essays, Which Illustrate How Large Sections Of Rural South Asian Have Long Been Dynamic, Mobile, Resilient And Rational Agents. It Discusses Primarity Three Types Of Nomads--Animal Husbanders, Including Gatherers And Hunters, Peripatetic Traders And Entretainers.

Focussing On Nomadic Societies In The Region, This Reader Brings Together Essays, Which Illustrate How Large Sections Of Rural South Asian Have Long Been Dynamic, Mobile, Resilient And Rational Agents. It Discusses Primarity Three Types Of Nomads--Animal Husbanders, Including Gatherers And Hunters, Peripatetic Traders And Entretainers.

Includes chapter on reindeer herding.

This volume provides a series of international case studies, prefaced by a comprehensive literature review and concluding with an end note drawing together the themes and key issues relating to educational services for nomadic groups around the world. [Book jacket].

Bringing together over thirty years of detailed ethnographic research on the Menraq of Malaysia, this fascinating book analyzes and documents the experience of development and modernization in tribal communities. Descendents of hunter-gatherers who have inhabited Southeast Asia for about 40,000 years, the Menraq (also known as Semang or Negritos) were nomadic foragers until they were resettled in a Malaysian government-mandated settlement in 1972. Modernity and Malaysia begins with the ‘Jeli Incident’ in which several Menraq were alleged to have killed three Malays, members of the dominant ethnic group in the country. Alberto Gomes links this uncharacteristic violence to Menraq experiences of Malaysian-style modernity that have left them displaced, depressed, discontented, and disillusioned. Tracing the transformation of the lives of Menraq resulting from resettlement, development, and various ‘civilizing projects’, this book examines how the encounter with modernity has led the subsistence-oriented, relatively autonomous Menraq into a life of dependence on the state and the market. Challenging conventional social scientific understanding of concepts such as modernity and marginalization, and providing empirical material for comparison with the experience of modernity for indigenous peoples around the world, Modernity and Malaysia is a valuable resource for students and scholars of anthropology, development studies and indigenous studies, as well as those with a more general interest in asian studies.

A major reinterpretation of the rise of the Indo-Islamic world rooted in world history and geography.

This book explores the dynamic interaction between economic life, society and civilisation in the regions around and beyond the Indian Ocean during the period from the rise of Islam to 1750. Within a distinctive theory of comparative history, Professor Chaudhuri analyses how the identity of different Asian civilisations was established. He examines the structural features of food habits, clothing, architectural styles and housing; the different modes of economic production; and the role of crop raising, pastoral nomadism, and industrial activities for the main regions of the Indian Ocean. In an original and perceptive conclusion, the author demonstrates how Indian Ocean societies were united or separated from one another by a conscious cultural and linguistic identity. However, there was a deeper structure of unities created by a common ecology, technology, technology of economic production, traditions of government, theory of political obligations and rights, and a shared historical experience. His theory enables the author to show that the real Indian Ocean was an area that extended historically from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to the sea which lies beyond Japan.