The article is an inquiry into the elision of an image—that of the cotton-producing Garo—in the colonial archive. It situates this inquiry within the pre- and early colonial era where it is still possible to uncover elements of the irrefutable sovereign presence of Garos in eastern India as well as of the regional economic and political system through which the Garo social being makes itself historically visible. Parsing together a narrative of the Garo political order in this period, the article will discuss the ways in which the sovereignty of a people was pivoted around the production and trade in cotton. Rescuing the image of the cotton-producing Garo from the colonial archive is also a retracing of the seamless becoming of the Garo peasant, as adept at working with the hoe as with the plough, into a cotton trader who embarked on long journeys on foot and on boats every cotton season to the lowlands. The article will also probe into the germaneness of the concept of the 'hill/forest tribe' with the sedentary plainsman as its oppositional image and the embedding of ethnicity in circumscribed 'natural' habitats in eastern India by the colonial state.
We investigate the relationship between personal and professional familiarly, team effectiveness, and viability, and how these relationships are mediated by information elaboration in global virtual teams. We further assess whether virtuality moderates the relationships between both types of familiarity and information elaboration. Based on data collected from 63 global virtual supply chain teams, our results suggest that professional familiarity is positively associated with team information elaboration, which in turn relates positively to both manager-rated team effectiveness and team leader–rated viability. Furthermore, team virtuality enhances the influence of personal familiarity on information elaboration, but dampens the relationship between professional familiarity and information elaboration. Our results suggest that professional familiarity is a more salient antecedent of information elaboration in global virtual teams. We discuss the implications of our results for both theory and practice.