CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE
Jawaharlal Nehru University
SEMINAR SERIES
BENGT G. KARLSSON
Professor of Social Anthropology,
Stockholm University
On
Crossing paths: Reflections on three decades of research on indigenous issues
Abstract: In this talk I will consider my own journey as a Western anthropologist working on indigenous peoples’ issues in Northeast India. The focus is on the research process – the questions, methods, theories and concepts – I have been pursuing. My point of departure is three earlier projects and one ongoing. The common thread running through these projects concerns the lives and livelihoods of indigenous peoples in a rapidly changing world.
About the Speaker: Bengt G. Karlsson is mainly working on issues relating to indigenous peoples and the society-environment interface, with particular focus on the politics of ethnicity and nature in India. Karlsson has published on topics like indigeneity, forests, conservation, mining, subaltern movements, ethnicity, development and political ecology. He is presently working on a project on food sovereignty in Eastern Himalayas. Karlsson is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.
He is the author of Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People’s Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal (Routledge, 2000), Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India's Northeast (Berghahn Book, 2011), Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (Cambridge University Press, 2019, co-authored with Dolly Kikon), and the editor of Indigeneity in India (Kegan Paul 2006, with Tanka B. Subba), Geographies of Difference: Explorations in Northeast Indian Studies (Routledge, 2017, with M. Vandenhelsken and M. Barkataki-Ruscheweyh) and Seedways: The Circulation, Care and Control of Plants in a Warming World (Vitterhetsakademien, 2021, with Annika Rabo).
3.00 PM, Friday, 28 October 2022
Conference Room, CSLG, JNU
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