Book

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

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. Focusing on the ongoing reinterpretation of traditions, or customs, the book critiques the all too often taken-for-granted assumption that upland societies are unchanging, characterized by cultural homogeneity and strong internal cohesion. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book focuses on a rural area where a substantial number of people practice the traditional Garo community religion.

Author

Erik de Maaker

Date

15 March 2022

Links

Website of the publisher

The book does not aim to document and idealize relics of cultural practices destined for extinction in the face of greater forces such as globalization. Yet it does ask why people continue to be committed to practices that are considered obsolete elsewhere in the same region, given that over the last century and a half the vast majority of the Garo have abandoned the community religion in favour of Christianity. 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. Far from being immutable, these relationships need to be constantly expressed, enacted, and (re-)interpreted. 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.