3 Review(s)

About the BookCultures of the Indigenous: India and Beyond is the first in a series designed under the dynamic field of "De-territorializing Diversities: Cultures, Literatures and Languages of the Indigenous." The essays in this volume address theoretical, ethnographic and existential issues related to identity and community formation concerning indigenous communities in diverse cultures across the world. The analyses bear upon a complex set of questions concerning the relation between tangible and intangible cultures that construct this discourse. The papers are grounded in an awareness of the colonial, post colonial, literary and academic textualizations of these discourses, which have often prevented them from being heard or their silences understood. Interested readers seeking an introduction to this field will be sufficiently provoked by the arguments in this book so as to smoothly transit in this area. The present volume is both, 'closer home' and India centric, as well as one that enables a sufficiently valuable dialogue with other cultures like that of Canada, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Kenya, Australia, America and Taiwan. The volume hopes to also build up on the existing debates related to the indigenous studies, as they exist today with the hope that it may trigger many more. The research findings collectively grapple with issues related to a subsuming sense of loss, failure of identity formation, dangers of extinction, travails of lack of recognition, acute sense of 'othering', appropriations by the hegemony of power, failure of ethnic well-being, deafening silences, unwritten acknowledgement, state apathy, faint resurgences and lack of a commanding perspective of scholarly debates in cultural, ethnographic, literary and anthropological studies. Arranged in three sections broadly titled: Tangible and Intangible, Restor(y)ing, and The Neglect, they point towards a confluence of ideas inherent in the study of the indigenous.