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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2013

Margins and borders: polities and ethnicities in North-East India

Philippe Ramirez

Résumé

When not imposed, e.g. by the State, territories are mainly defined by processes of identity. In Northeast India the spatial references of identities have experienced tremendous changes. Formerly, the political settings were frequently based on links with a centre more than on belonging to a continuous space. These affiliations were themselves subject to reshaping, specially according to inter-States politics. By contrast, emerging identities give today a large importance to the territorial dimension and more generally adopt the XIXth century's European national paradigms: one people, one culture, one country. So the search for new territories is being impeded by the existence of former modes of belonging. The cultural and linguistic entanglements of Northeast India do not ease the process. Furthermore, tribal belonging itself remains problematic, blurred by the dialectical relationship between clan and space. So clan belonging, spatial belonging and cultural/linguistic features often prove contradictory. This situation is particularly prevalent among the people inhabiting transitional spaces, between plains and hills, "people of the margins", whose history and social morphology is that of brokers between States. We will consider the case of people living at the borders of Meghalaya and Assam.
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Dates et versions

hal-01382599 , version 1 (17-10-2016)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01382599 , version 1

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Philippe Ramirez. Margins and borders: polities and ethnicities in North-East India. Joëlle Smadja. Territorial Changes and Territorial Restructurings in the Himalayas, Adroit, 2013, 978-8187393016. ⟨hal-01382599⟩
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