Sujeet George
I am also developing a new postdoc project on indigenous ecologies that examines the co-constitutive histories of the development of the ideas of indigeneity, ecology, and politico-territorial sovereignty in modern South Asia. While caste has classically been understood as the primary mode of social stratification in Indian society, the idea of the ‘primitive’ and of the indigenous has had a more contentious definitional legacy. In postcolonial India, the discourse of affirmative action has tended to coalesce the social marginalization and political underrepresentation of historically disenfranchised caste groups and Scheduled Tribes. Characterized as adivasis—the original inhabitants of the land—the rationalizations undergirding the classificatory mechanisms inscribed on these groups have imbibed the legacies of colonial anthropology, twentieth-century science and environmental policy, as well as the aspirations and anxieties of postcolonial nation-building. Indigenous Ecologies explores the dialectical relationship between nature and nativeness, between the indigenous and the international, and the increased reliance on technoscience to solve longer-term problems of food production and loss of biodiversity.