Overview

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.

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9780192863461

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Jelle Wouters has come of age, both in terms of theoretical insights and writing skills, and with Vernacular Politics he seems fully poised to dominate the scene. This book not only brings together some of the theoretically most topical, portent, and inebriating concepts like counter-sovereignties, ethno-politics, bio-moral politics, prophecy as politics, cosmo-politics, alter-politics, and compressed modernity, but also some of the most promising young and a few but highly accomplished senior scholars. * Tanka B. Subba, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong * Vernacular Politics challenges the illusion of transparency of the practices and aspirations of contemporary politics. The essays draw out the multiple and complex local meanings attached to voting, running for office, or offering armed resistance and provide fresh perspectives on politics in Northeast India. * Sanjib Baruah, Bard College, New York. *

Author Information

Jelle P Wouters is a social anthropologist and teaches in the Department of Social Sciences at Royal Thimphu College. He has written on politics, insurgency, capitalism, and identity in Northeast India, and is the author of In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency: Tribes, State, and Violence in Northeast India (OUP, 2018).

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