Vernacular Politics in Northeast India : Democracy, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity

Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of ‘the political’ as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India’s spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its people conceive of their political lives. Fourteen chapters by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region’s political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how forms and politics of indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples. Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how forms and politics of indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples. "Nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Approaching politics in the vernacular, this book thinks itself afresh into the region's political life."