[Reader-list] SociologySeminar at SAU: Mobility and Rootedness in Adivasi India

[Diya Mehra]

The Department of Sociology, South
Asian University invites you to a seminar



The Shimmering Landscape: Mobility and
Rootedness in Adivasi India
by Kaushik GhoshAssistant Professor, University of
Texas, Austin and Associate Professor, Shiv Nadar University, Noida
Wednesday 11 September 2013, 2.30
PM,
FSI Hall, Ground Floor, South Asian University, Akbar Bhawan, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi










Abstract: "Migration" and
"rootedness" typically have appeared as a fundamental opposition
in the long arc of modern imaginaries. The one cancels the other. The body
of the indigenous/adivasi person poses an interesting challenge to this
form of "state philosophy" based on representation and identity.
 In India, over the last two centuries, the indigenous body has
simultaneously been the most "migratory" and yet the most
"rooted." The adivasi has been the staple "migrant laborer"
who has enabled each new cycle of capital accumulation while clearly being
the most visible "actor" in the vast archive of resistance to
territorial displacement and in the reaffirmation of a persistent art of
attending to place and the land. How does one grasp this simultaneity?
Beyond the obvious subversion of dualist thinking, it reignites our
imagination of land and identity. How does one inhabit the world in
this simultaneity? In my talk, I'll take a moment of such adivasi
inhabitation of the world and try to map an emerging sense of a more dense
and complex sense of territory, land and the issue of sovereignty.