The Gaddi of North India are agro-pastoralists who rear sheep and goats following a seasonal migration around the first Himalayan range. While studies on pastoralists have focused either on the pastoralists’ adaptation to their physical environment or treated the environment from a symbolic perspective, this book offers a new, holistic perspective that analyzes the ways in which people “make” place. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book not only describes a contemporary understanding of the Gaddi’s engagement with the environment but also analyzes religious practices and performances of social relations, as well as media practices and notions of aesthetics. Thereby, the landscape in which the Gaddi live is understood as a network of places that is constantly being built and rebuilt through these local practices. The book contributes to the growing interest in approaches of practice within environmental anthropology.

Presents An Exclusive Descruption Of Folk Dances, Folk Lores, Folk Songs With Their Notation And Musical Instruments Of The Gaddi Tribe Of Himachal Pradesh.

Vasant Saberwal explores the origins of the alarmist rhetoric on land degradation in the western Himalaya, which he finds to be unsubstantiated according to empirical evidence and ecological theory.

Study with reference to Western Pahari language.

There Is A General Impression Among Many That Before Its Formation (1948) Himachal Pradesh Had No Social Or Cultural Unity. The Present Work Clears Up These Misconceptions And Examines From Facts Of History The Constant, Rich And Fruitful Socio-Cultural History Of The State.

Why has India's astonishing economic growth not reached the people at the bottom of its social and economic hierarchy? Traveling the length and breadth of the subcontinent, this book shows how India's "untouchables" and "tribals" fit into the global economy. India's Dalit and Adivasi communities make up a staggering one in twenty-five people across the globe and yet they remain among the most oppressed. Conceived in dialogue with economists, Ground Down by Growth reveals the lived impact of global capitalism on the people of these communities. Through anthropological studies of how the oppressions of caste, tribe, region, and gender impact the working poor and migrant labor in India, this startling new anthology illuminates the relationship between global capital and social inequality in the Indian context. Collectively, the chapters of this volume expose how capitalism entrenches social difference, transforming traditional forms of identity-based discrimination into new mechanisms of exploitation and oppression.

What gives artefacts their power and beauty? This ethnographic study of the decorated long yams made by the Nyamikum Abelam in Papua New Guinea examines how these artefacts acquire their specific properties through processes that mobilise and recruit diverse entities, substances and domains. All come together to form the ‘finished product’ that is displayed, representing what could be an indigenous form of non-verbal ‘sociology’. Engaging with several contemporary anthropological topics (material culture, techniques, arts, aesthetics, rituals, botany, cosmology, Melanesian ethnography), the text also discusses in depth the complex position of the study of ‘technology’ within anthropology.

In Adivasis and the State, Alf Gunvald Nilsen presents a major study of how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in the Bhil heartland of western India. The book unravels the historical processes that subordinated Bhil Adivasi communities to the everyday tyranny of the state and investigates how social movements have mobilised to reclaim citizenship. In doing so, the book also reveals how collective action from below transform the meanings of governmental categories, legal frameworks, and universalising vocabularies of democracy. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India. Towards this end, Adivasis and the State contributes a sustained and nuanced Gramscian analysis of hegemony in order to interrogate the possibilities and limits of subaltern political engagement with state structures.