Townsend Middleton

The Demands of Recognition

State Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Townsend Middleton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 304
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. Oktober 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 152mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 544g
• ISBN-13: 9780804795425
• ISBN-10: 0804795428
• Artikelnr.: 42792276

Autorenporträt

Townsend Middleton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Becoming 'Tribal' in Darjeeling: An Introduction to the
Ethno-Contemporary
chapter abstract
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.
1A Searching Politics: Anxiety, Belonging, Recognition
chapter abstract
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.
2Durga and the Rock: A Colonial Category and its Discontents
chapter abstract
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.
3Tribal Recognition: A Postcolonial Problem
chapter abstract
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.
4Interface: Encounters of the Multicultural State
chapter abstract
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'.
5Soft Science in Hard Places: Government Anthropologists and Their
Knowledge
chapter abstract
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 chapter illustrates
the hierarchies of expertise that constitute this form of 21st century
governance. Middleton goes on to show how these politics within the state
impact communities aspiring to the government's care. Chapter 5 provides a
necessarily humanized understanding of the operations and operatives of
ethnological governmentality today.
6Reforming the Subject: The Effects and Affects of Recognition
chapter abstract
Chapter 6 examines the social, subjective, and affective dynamics of
becoming a 21st century tribe. The ethnography focuses on the efforts of
ethnic associations, political parties, and everyday citizens to remake the
tribal subject. Buoyed by the prospects of affirmative action and autonomy,
Darjeeling's tribal movements induced sweeping sensations of ethnic
rebirth, but also considerable controversy, confusion, and division.
Sorting through these intended and unintended outcomes, Middleton explores
how the logics of tribal becoming do and do not make their way into the
body and body politic. This chapter's phenomenological analyses offer a
balanced look at the positive and darker sides of indigeneity. The
vignettes provide intimate portrayals of the hopes, tensions, and
ambivalences that marked the tribal turn in Darjeeling. These findings
consequently raise pressing (and uncomfortable) questions about how
ethnology is being used within contemporary social movements-indigenous,
tribal, and otherwise.
7Perpetuated Paradigms: At the Limits of Ethno-Intelligibility
chapter abstract
Asking what happened after the tribal turn, Chapter 7 covers a shocking
series of events by which a television show, Indian Idol, sparked a violent
political upheaval. With the birth of a new Gorkhaland Movement in 2007,
the terms of mobilization suddenly shifted from tribal back to Gorkha. Like
its tribal predecessors, Darjeeling's latest Liberation Front mobilized
idioms of indigeneity to render identity anew. Also like its tribal
predecessors, the movement failed. Transferring the onus of failure from
communities and to the state, Middleton uses these developments to expose
the strictures and changing conditions of late liberalism in India. Asking
what is old, what is new, and what alternatives exist for minorities amid
the state's blinkered grids of ethno-intelligibility, he advocates for a
deeper, more historical reading of the ethno-contemporary-one agile enough
to track its fluctuating forms, while grounded enough to reveal its
enduring exclusions and affects.
Epilogue: Negotiating the Ethno-Contemporary
chapter abstract
The epilogue steps back to consider what this book's findings mean for
communities, governments, and the human sciences. Written in dialogue with
postcolonial theory, it addresses the benefits and dangers of ethnographic
critique amid the emerging 'lives' of ethnology in the world today.
Middleton frames the ethno-contemporary as an intellectual problem and
opportunity. The book concludes by offering thoughts on how the 21st
century ethnographer might navigate its protean contours and work with its
various 'tribes' (anthropologists included) to develop new modes of
recognition-and new ways of being-that can better serve us all. Amidst this
ethnologically affected present, thinking beyond our current systems of
recognition promises to be vital for forging an alternative future.