Workshop 2: Exclusionary Regimes and Resource Appropriation (Winter School 2017)

Workshop 2: Exclusionary Regimes and Resource Appropriation: Conceptual and Methodological Dynamics

 

Coordinator:

• Thanuja Mummidi

Anthropologist (Pondicherry University, Puducherry)

Invited Tutors:

• Sangeeta Dasgupta

Historian (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

• Raphaël Mathevet

Geographer (French Institute of Pondicherry, Puducherry)

• Felix Padel

Anthropologist (Centre for World Environmental History, University of Sussex)

• Jayaprakash P. Rao

Sociologist (Osmania University, Hyderabad)

• Ravi Rebbapragada

Rural Development (Mines, Minerals & People, Vishakhapatnam)

Argument-Purpose 

The workshop focuses on natural resources and its spaces like the exclusionary regime (Li, 2007) but with an agenda to understand the politics of its appropriation. In this focus, the workshop will look at the indigenous populations or more specifically the scheduled tribes of India in tracing the different articulations for appropriation and thus framing the exclusionary regime. Capitalist dispossessions (nexus of the state-corporations-market) of primary resources as in land, forest and water have continued both in colonial and independent India. However, the long rhetoric of independent India for dispossession has been for the benevolence of this population under the umbrella of development. Though environmental advocacy has given leverage in resisting dispossession, the appropriation of practices of sustainability and biodiversity by the regime through articulations of ‘voluntary biodiversity off-sets’ and prefixing ‘green’ to all capitalist dispossessions have diluted this advocacy potential for the STs. The onus to counter to such articulations has long been left to the people, the voices of the dispossessed.

The workshop will explore the methodological potential in understanding the voices of the dispossessed through the framework of ‘cultural politics’ and ‘reverse anthropology’.

The workshop intends to facilitate research of young scholars working on this broad theme through the following sequence for the first two and a half days: highlighting the overlap of scheduled tribe spaces and natural resources; framing the exclusionary regime; tracing articulations of appropriation and counter articulations of the dispossessed; theoretical frames and methodological challenges: discussing political economy, political ecology, cultural politics and reverse anthropology. The second half of day three will attempt to initiate the group into a simulated research thinking over a specific research design as an outcome of the series of lectures. The concluding Day 4 is devoted to group work restitution, sharing workshop experience and results. 

Workshop 2 Schedule

DAY 1 – TUESDAY, DECEMBER 5
9:00-9:30	Opening Speech Introduction and objectives of the workshop Presentation of trainers and participants
9:30-11:00	Highlighting the overlap of schedule tribe spaces and natural resources
11:00-11:15	Coffee/Tea Break
11:15-12:30	Archives and oral narratives: situating the Representation of Adivasis
12:30-14:00	Lunch
14:00-15:15	Adivasis and ethnographies: evolutionary to reverse Anthropology
15:15-15:30	Coffee/Tea break
15:30-17:00	Framing the exclusionary regime
DAY 2 – WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6
9:00-11:15	Tracing articulations of appropriation
11:15-11:30	Coffee/Tea break
11:30-12:30	Articulations of the dispossessed
12:30-14:00	Lunch
14:00-15:15	Theoretical frames: political economy, political ecology, and cultural politics (how are these frames relevant and used in research on resource appropriation)
15:15-15:30	Coffee/Tea break
15:30-17:00	Theoretical frames: political economy, political ecology, and cultural politics (contd.)
DAY 3 – THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7
9:00-10:30	Articulations of the dispossessed (contd.)
10:30-12:00	Articulations of the dispossessed-participatory video
12:30-14:00	Lunch
14:00-18:00	Preparation of the restitution and project by participants
DAY 4 – FRIDAY, DECEMBER 8
9:00-11:00	Group work
11:00-11:15	Coffee/Tea break
11:15-12:30	Group work
12:30-14:00	Lunch
14:00-15:30	Group work
15:30-15:45	Coffee/Tea break
15:45-18:00	Group work restitution of project Discussion of the results and the workshops Valedictory

 Readings 

Baviskar, Amita. 2004. In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley.   Second Edition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Baviskar, Amita. 2008. Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power. New Delhi: OUP.

Benabou, Sarah. 2014. Making Up for Lost Nature? A Critical Review of the International Development  of Voluntary Biodiversity Offsets. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 5: 103-123.

Croll, E. & D. Parkin. 1992. Anthropology, the Environment and Development. In Bush Base-Forest Farm: Culture, Environment and Development. E. Croll and D. Parkin, eds. Pp. 3-10. London: Routledge.

Dasgupta, S. and D. Rycroft. 2011. The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi. London and New York: Routledge.

Dasgupta, S. 2016. Reading the archive, reframing adivasi histories: An introduction. Indian Economic and Social History Review (Special Issue), Vol. 53:1, pp.1-8.

Fairhead, James, Leach, Melissa, and Ian Scoones. 2012. Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature? The Journal of Peasant Studies 39, no. 2: 237–261. doi:10.1080/03066150.2012.671770.

Ghosh, Kaushik. 2006. Between global flows and local dams: indigenousness, locality, and the transnational sphere in Jharkhand, India. Cultural Anthropology 21(4): 501-534.

Guha, Ramachandra. 1989. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya. California: University of California Press.

Igoe, Jim, and Dan Brockington. 2007. Neoliberal Conservation: A Brief Introduction. Conservation and Society 5, no. 4: 432–449.

Igoe, Jim, Katja Neves, and Dan Brockington. 2010. A Spectacular Eco-Tour Around the Historic Bloc: Theorizing the Convergence of Biodiversity Conservation and Capitalist Expansion. Antipode 42, no. 3: 486–512. doi:0.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00761.x.

Kirsch, Stuart. 2014. Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their Critics. California: University of California Press

Kirsch, Stuart. 2006. Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Latour, Bruno.1999. Politics of Nature: how to bring science into democracy. Discovery.

Li, Tania Murray. 2010. Indigeneity, Capitalism, and the Management of Dispossession. Current Anthropology 51(3): 385– 414.

Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Li, Tania Murray. 2014. Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mosse, David. 2004. Is Good Policy Unimplementable? Reflections on the Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. Development and Change 35(4):639-671.

Mummidi, Thanuja. 2012. Coexistent and Conflicting Standards of Value: Dynamics in the Social meaning of Money among Konda Reddis, South India. The Eastern Anthropologist 65(1):81-96.

Padel, Felix. 2010 (1995). Sacrificing People: Invasions of a Tribal Landscape. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.

Padel, Felix. 2007. ‘Reverse anthropology’. Review of Kirsch 2006, at http://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=8264 

Padel, Felix. August 2012. ‘Is central India’s civil war a resource war over metals for arms?’ at https://www.wri-irg.org/en/story/2012/central-indias-civil-war-resource-war-over-metals-arms

Padel, Felix. July 2014. ‘The Niyamgiri Movement as a Landmark of Democratic Process,’ Vikalpsangam, at http://vikalpsangam.org/article/the-niyamgiri-movement-as-a-landmark-of-democratic-process/#.U9HMfLEruO5

Padel, Felix. 2014. Interview with Survival International: http://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3322-interview-with-felix-padel   

Padel, Felix. 2015. Interview with Sanctuary Asia: http://www.sanctuaryasia.com/people/interviews/9886-meet-anthropologist-activist-dr-felix-padel

Padel, Felix, Samarendra Das. 2010. Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis & the Aluminium Cartel.  New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan.

Padel, Felix,  Ajay Dandekar, Jeemol Unni. 2013. Ecology, Economy: Quest for a Socially Informed Connection. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan.

Ramnath, Madhu. 2008. Surviving the Forest Rights Act: Between Scylla and Charybdis. Economic and Political Weekly 43(09): 37-42.

Ramnath, Madhu. 2015. Woodsmoke and Leafcups: Autobiographical footnotes to the anthropology of the Durwa. Noida: Litmus Harper Collins.

Rao, Jayaprakash. 1982. Konda Reddis in Transition: Three Case Studies. In Tribes in India: The Struggle for Survival, ed. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, pp. 250-286. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Robertson, Morgan. 2006. The Nature That Capital Can See: Science, State, and Market in the Commodification of Ecosystem Services. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 3:367–387. doi:0.1068/d3304.

Sundar, Nandini. 2009. Legal Grounds: Natural Resources, Identity, and the Law in Jharkhand. New Delhi: OUP.

Sundar, Nandini. 2016. The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar. Juggernaut publications.

Xaxa, Virginius. 2003. Tribes in India. The Oxford India Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Xaxa, Virginius. 1999. Tribes as Indigenous People of India. Economic and Political Weekly, vol.34, 51: 3589-3595.

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