The Ho: Living in a World of Plenty - Of Social Cohesion and Ritual Friendship on the Chota Nagpur Plateau, India

The book is set in the anthropologically much-neglected multi-ethnic interior of Highland Middle India. It is the result of fieldwork done over a period of more than a decade among the Ho, an indigenous community of approximately one million people, who have shared cultural norms and the space of the hilly region of the Chota Nagpur Plateau with other aboriginal (__adivasi__) and artisan communities for ages. The book explores the structured tapestry of Ho people’s relations and interrelatedness within their culture-specific sociocosmic universe ensuring their social reproduction in the present and affording them the means for and the awareness of living in a world of plenty. This world of abundance – with the Ho as its conceptual centre – includes the Ho’s dead, their complex spirit world and supreme deity, and their tribal and nontribal fellow humans, and it manifests itself in manifold facets of their lives: socially, ritually, economically, and linguistically. "This is an important piece of work. The ethnographic details in it are invaluable. The fieldwork is superb. What comes across so magnificently is that unique quality of the author's human and emotional contact and shared understanding with the people." MICHAEL YORKE: University College, London; Upside Films "The book is set in the anthropologically much-neglected multi-ethnic interior of Highland Middle India. It is the result of fieldwork done over a period of more than a decade among the Ho, an indigenous community of approximately one million people, who have shared cultural norms and the space of the hilly region of the Chota Nagpur Plateau with other aboriginal (adivasi) and artisan communities for ages. The book explores the structured tapestry of Ho people's relations and interrelatedness within their culture-specific sociocosmic universe ensuring their social reproduction in the present and affording them the means for and the awareness of living in a world of plenty. This world of abundance - with the Ho as its conceptual centre - includes the Ho's dead, their complex spirit world and supreme deity, and their tribal and nontribal fellow humans, and it manifests itself in manifold facets of their lives: socially, ritually, economically, and linguistically."-- Publisher description Abstract 7 Contents 9 Acknowledgments 11 Annotations 15 Prologue 19 1 Introduction: Living in a world of plenty 25 2 The Chota Nagpur Plateau: terrain and people 44 3 Living in a world of relations: of Ho social categories 70 4 Ho accounts of social cohesion in history, myth, and the present 116 5 Relatedness across tribal boundaries: the Ho and their clients 154 6 The saki relation as ritual friendship 177 7 Two portraits as conclusion 268 Appendices 310 Glossary I: Notes on Ho history 337 Glossary II: Ho terms 360 Lists of Plates, Figures, and Maps 383 References 385 Index 396