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"The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia.

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.


The handbook reveals both regional commonalities and diversities, generalities and specificities, and a broad orientation to key themes in the region. An indispensable reference work, this handbook fills a significant gap in the literature and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in Highland Asia, Zomia Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Conceptual History and Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies and South Asian Studies as well as Asian Studies in general."

The art of the ethnic Nagas in north-east India is still enmeshed with the colonial portrayal of tribal life. What is enacted as tribal art by "insiders" has a quality of "staged authenticity," while "outsiders" appraise the fast-changing traditional art as if suspended in time. Here, the stakeholders that mediate the production and representation of Naga art and aesthetics exacerbate the inconsistency. The boundary between an insider and outsider is blurring in other areas of social and cultural life, but traditional art is appropriated to reinforce the dichotomy. In this context, identity polemics and tourism industry are posited as prime movers shaping the contours of contemporary Naga art and aesthetics. Along this argument, this article draws upon Erving Goffman's dramaturgical analysis to analyse Naga art life as a process of continuity and change.

Commemorating the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, this article explores his influence among the ethnic Nagas. The Nagas scarcely crossed paths with Gandhi owing to their peculiar location in Indian history and society. But when some Naga leaders did meet Gandhi, they were on a mission themselves for self-determination—a political movement that metamorphosed into an armed struggle in the post-independence period. Did Gandhi make any impact in the modern Naga society? Chronicling the lives of some of the key leaders in the Naga political movement, this article attempts to understand their political activism and ideological stance in light of Gandhi's philosophy and teachings.

This article gives an ethnographic account of a folk Hindu belief surrounding a popular village deity in Junga, a tehsil in Shimla district in rural Himachal Pradesh. A complex sociocultural relationship involving a village deity, a symbolic princely state, religious specialists and devotees is analysed. The article argues that a supernatural being or a deity that appeals to the masses is marked by its accessibility and tangibility, which instils deep faith in devotees and makes supernatural a part of mundane life, and not only confined to the realm of the sacred, and this characteristic feature found in a village deity cult lends ebullience to folk Hinduism.

Will Sweetman and Aditya Malik (Eds), Hinduism in India: Modern and Contemporary Movements. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2016, xvii + 308 pp., ₹795, ISBN: 9789351500995 (Hardbound).

This volume gives an in-depth account of cultural heritage of Nagaland covering important themes like cultural beliefs, traditional knowledge, material culture, and social institutions. Contributors from diverse dis ciplines and backgrounds have delved into the cultural heritage of the state's variegated tribes. Nagaland a hilly state in North-East India had been the centre of British colonialism and American Baptist mission. This cultural contact is significantly reflected in the socio-cultural life, and the contributors have shed light on the continuities and changes. This volume highlights the multiplicity of cultural traditions that are specific to various tribes inhabiting sixteen districts of Nagaland, since their experiences of modernity and cultural contact with 'others' have been diverse.The contributors have mainly focussed on the cultural heritage of the majority Naga tribes, but other tribes like the Kukis and Kacharis are part and parcel of the cultural melting pot of Nagaland, and this volume in a way underscores the cultural exchange and interactions.Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print version of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka