Reworking Culture : Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in Garo Hills, North East India

This book provides intimate insights into the lives of farmers in Garo Hills, North-East India. Based on a long-term ethnographic engagement, it focuses on followers of traditional Garo animism, whose land constitutes their most important resource. In response to new economic and political opportunities, as well as to changes in the ontological landscape, people continually reinterpret the multiple relationships that connect them as a community, as well as to the spirits, and the land.

Reworking Culture: Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in Garo Hills, North-East India provides intimate insights into the lives of hill farmers and the challenges they face in day-to-day life. Focussing on the reinterpretation of traditions, or customs, the book critiques the all too often taken for granted assumption that upland societies are characterised by cultural homogeneity and strong internal cohesion. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book focuses on a rural area in which land continues to constitute the most important resource that people have access to, and that has a substantial number of followers of traditional Garo community religion. In doing so, the book explores the creation and continuing reinterpretation of the multiple relationships through which people are connected to one another, as well as to their environment. These relationships are embedded in normative frameworks that are demanding, yet leave room for ambiguity and negotiation. Far from being immutable, these need to be constantly expressed, (re-)interpreted and enacted. Reworking Culture shows how what people perceive as tradition, is continuously revised and reworked in response to new economic and political opportunities, as well as to changes in the ontological landscape.