Jelle J P Wouters
I am a social anthropologist and carried out long-term ethnographic and historical research among the upland and tribal Nagas in India’s generally lesser known Northeastern Region, writing about insurgency, violence, vernacular politics, capitalism, resource-extraction, and social history. My main research area and focus today are environmental humanities, climate change, water, and human-animal-plant entanglements in Bhutan, and Highland Asia more widely.
I hold an MPhil (Distinction) in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, and later completed a PhD in Anthropology from the North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong (India). Before joining Royal Thimphu College (Bhutan) as a lecturer I taught for two years at Sikkim Central University, where I was asked to establish the Anthropology Department, and was a visiting fellow (2014-2015) at Eberhard Karls University on a “Teaching for Excellence” award granted by the German Research Foundation. I currently also serve as the Chair of the Himalayan Centre for Environmental Humanities, Thimphu.
Supervisor: Tanka B Subba
I hold an MPhil (Distinction) in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, and later completed a PhD in Anthropology from the North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong (India). Before joining Royal Thimphu College (Bhutan) as a lecturer I taught for two years at Sikkim Central University, where I was asked to establish the Anthropology Department, and was a visiting fellow (2014-2015) at Eberhard Karls University on a “Teaching for Excellence” award granted by the German Research Foundation. I currently also serve as the Chair of the Himalayan Centre for Environmental Humanities, Thimphu.
Supervisor: Tanka B Subba
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Books by Jelle J P Wouters
The collective endeavour of the book is expressed in what the editors characterize as the clime studies of the Himalayan multispecies worlds. As a terrestrial concept, the individual case studies concretize the abstract concept of climate change in their place- and culturally-specific correlations of weather, climate pattern, and landscape change. Supported by empirical and historical findings, the concept in each chapter showcases climate change as clime change. As place, clime is discerned as both a recipient of and a contributor to climate change over time in the Himalayan context. It affirms climate change as multispecies encounters, as part of multifaceted cultural processes, and as ecologically-specific environmental changes in the more-than-human worlds of the Himalayas.
As the case studies complement, enrich, and converse with natural scientific understandings of Himalayan climate change, this book offers students, academics, and the interested public fresh approaches to the interdisciplinary field of climate studies and policy debates on climate change and sustainable development.
Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context.
A hands-on, practical, and comprehensive guide to Northeast India, this book fills a significant gap in the literature and will be an invaluable teaching, learning and research resource for scholars and students of Northeast India Studies, South Asian and Southeast Asian societies, culture, politics, humanities, and the social sciences in general.
Articles by Jelle J P Wouters
know little about the form and functioning of democratic politics
amongst tribes. This is a serious lacuna, one which, at the level
of sociology, impedes the kind of careful comparison that has
long proven fruitful to capture the inner logic and intricacies
of social life. If caste is deemed central to any understanding of
contemporary Indian politics, what about those states and constituencies in which tribes preponderate numerically?
The collective endeavour of the book is expressed in what the editors characterize as the clime studies of the Himalayan multispecies worlds. As a terrestrial concept, the individual case studies concretize the abstract concept of climate change in their place- and culturally-specific correlations of weather, climate pattern, and landscape change. Supported by empirical and historical findings, the concept in each chapter showcases climate change as clime change. As place, clime is discerned as both a recipient of and a contributor to climate change over time in the Himalayan context. It affirms climate change as multispecies encounters, as part of multifaceted cultural processes, and as ecologically-specific environmental changes in the more-than-human worlds of the Himalayas.
As the case studies complement, enrich, and converse with natural scientific understandings of Himalayan climate change, this book offers students, academics, and the interested public fresh approaches to the interdisciplinary field of climate studies and policy debates on climate change and sustainable development.
Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context.
A hands-on, practical, and comprehensive guide to Northeast India, this book fills a significant gap in the literature and will be an invaluable teaching, learning and research resource for scholars and students of Northeast India Studies, South Asian and Southeast Asian societies, culture, politics, humanities, and the social sciences in general.
know little about the form and functioning of democratic politics
amongst tribes. This is a serious lacuna, one which, at the level
of sociology, impedes the kind of careful comparison that has
long proven fruitful to capture the inner logic and intricacies
of social life. If caste is deemed central to any understanding of
contemporary Indian politics, what about those states and constituencies in which tribes preponderate numerically?
resilience of the ‘Naga village’ as a political, partisan, self-protective and affective unit. I perceive the Naga village as encompassing a moral community characterized by its temporal and spatial rootedness, and whose inhabitants define themselves through the conduit of historical memory – a nexus locally between history, locality, ancestral genealogy, and identity – and which orients their relations with neighbouring and nearby villages and villagers. More specifically, I discuss the contemporary form and substance of the ‘Naga village’ in relation to
(1) identity and identification, (2) local governance, particularly Nagaland’s policy of communitisation, and (3) democracy and elections.
interscientific, and inter-epistemological approaches generate the more wholesome and inclusive knowledge(s) that our anthropocenic earth now demands.
impulse that compelled thousands of Nagas to participate in a horrific public lynching of a perceived illegal immigrant. The inflow of ‘ethnic strangers’ is seen as challenging the Nagas’ ethno-territorial sovereignty and reinvigorates local obsessions with notions of autochthony – an emotive affirmation of Naga origins, roots, soil, genes, semen, and blood as the prime criteria of rights, entitlements, and belonging. This chapter presents immigration panic and ethnic violence as cultural and bodily friction blocking such flows. The implication? A body politic gripped by a volatile, potentially violent split between those considered autochthonous and those deemed outsiders.
Burmese/Myanmar nationalist regimes has undoubtedly worked to somewhat blend current political boundaries with political imagination among the Naga on both sides of the Indo- Myanmar border. However, among them Indian and Burmese nationalist tropes and representations have never precluded other, and non-statist, forms of belonging, identification and territoriality that refuse to limit themselves to these national spaces. The implication for ethnographic and social theory for the Naga? That, for one thing, their study within conventional national frames – what is called the fallacy of ‘methodological nationalism’ (see
Gellner 2012) – conjures a deeply problematic, a-historical and overtly statist approach. Here, instead, the study of ethnicity and belonging must ‘go transnational.’ Not, to be sure, because Nagas are diasporic, but because nascent political boundaries arbitrarily truncated their ancestral lands, territories and longstanding socio-political networks between two different countries.
region and its contemporary politics is poorly understood. Wouters
affirms that given the complexity of the ethno-social landscape, the
unfolding of the ‘political’ cannot be grasped through a narrow disciplinary and institutional boundary of politics
an intimate affinity to the region, either scholastically or by being native to the region. Hence, it provides an understanding of the intricate web of politics in Northeast India
partnership with Department of Adult and Higher Education, Ministry of Education. This special issue of Rig Tshoel–Research Journal of the Royal Thimphu College is dedicated to the papers presented at the conference
on a wide range of subjects. Authors are encouraged to develop their own scholarship in areas of general relevance to Bhutan, submit work that advances knowledge in their fields, and is written in a broadly accessible manner. High-quality original articles in English and Dzongkha including theoretical and empirical research, commentaries,
editorials, and reviews are welcome
on a wide range of subjects. Authors are encouraged to develop their own scholarship in areas of general relevance to Bhutan, submit work that advances knowledge in their fields, and is written in a broadly accessible manner. High-quality original articles in English and Dzongkha including theoretical and empirical research, commentaries,
editorials, and reviews are welcome
on a wide range of subjects. Authors are encouraged to develop their own scholarship in areas of general relevance to Bhutan, submit work that advances knowledge in their fields, and is written in a broadly accessible manner. High-quality original articles in English and Dzongkha including theoretical and empirical research, commentaries,
editorials, and reviews are welcome