Panel No. 1

Panel Title: Do Villages Matter?
A forum on the place of villages for contemporary anthropology in South Asia

Convenor: Diane Mines, Appalachian State University, USA
Co-convenor: Nicolas Yazgi, Neuchâtel University, Switzerland

     Wednesday 7 July 2004, 8–12 & 13–17

Panel Abstract: Villages are doubtlessly “lost objects” in the anthropology of India. Due to a history of ideas too complex to be outlined here, it has become tantamount to taboo to write about villages as such even though the vast majority of India’s population still has powerful links to villages, either as their primary locus of action, or through more widely embedded nexuses of representations and practices, including filmic, literary, and urban-nostalgic. Against the grain of some critics, we would argue that precisely because villages are in fact not ontologically bounded entities—neither closed, essential, nor homogeneous—ethnographic work on villages may (perhaps ironically to some) prevent just the sort of exaggerated exoticizing of Indian life that so many detractors of ethnography would reject.
This panel shall address ways in which it is possible, at the beginning of the 21st century, to argue that the village constitutes not only a viable, but indeed an important unit of investigation for understanding social, historical, personal, and political life in South Asia today. Among the themes that may be explored are these: the village as constructed and experienced by its inhabitants as also by urban dwellers, filmmakers, writers, etc.; constructions of ‘the villager’, whether as self and/or as other; the relevance of villages for collective action and for historical and biographical dynamics more generally; within a phenomenology of place, the village as both biomoral entity and locus of experience constituted of (and by) soil, persons, power, histories, reputations, agencies, ghosts, gods, ancestors, etc.; villages as localities in a “globalizing” world or as nodes in numerous networks of social actors of a very wide scope ranging from the local to the national and beyond. Papers on other relevant themes are also welcome.

         Read the convenor’s panel report after the conference

Papers accepted for presentation in the panel:

Paper Giver 1: Georg Pfeffer, Institut für Ethnologie, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Paper 1 Title: The Village of Tribal Middle India: Dumuntian Arguments Against Dumont

Paper Abstract: In his manifesto FOR A SOCIOLOGY OF INDIA, Louis Dumont (1957) criticised the ethnological preoccupation with Indian tribes and indicated that ‘most so-called “primitives” in India are only people who have lost contact’. He also argued that ‘the relation to the soil is not, in India as a whole’ one of the primary factors in social organisation. It is a secondary factor in relation to the two fundamental factors of kinship and caste’. Both statements were directed against the romantic and evolutionary preoccupation with ‘primeval’ society and ‘original’ communism and, indirectly, against the wave of ‘village studies’ in the 1950s. In greater detail, he criticised the proponents of THE ‘VILLAGE COMMUNITY’ FROM MUNRO TO MAINE (1964) for their lack of any detailed and localized description. My paper argues that any detailed localized description of a tribal village community in Middle India will reveal a political society, or territoriality as the primary sociological factor. Rather than an excess, the spectacular neglect of empirical or local studies has been responsible for the general ignorance of such tribal communities among South Asianists.

Paper Giver 2: Roger Jeffery and Patricia Jeffery, Dept. of Sociology, University of Edinburgh

Paper 2 Title: Changing modes of negotiating strategies and meanings in village
India: the case of child-bearing in Bijnor

Paper Abstract: Although, as the panel organisers write, ‘it has become tantamount to taboo to write about villages’ in the ethnography of India, we have been unfashionably conducting such studies in Bijnor district, UP, since 1982. Starting with two small villages, the focus of our field trips in 1982-3, 1985, and 2002-03, we took in two larger villages as our focus in 1990-91 and in 2000-01. But in the course of this shift we have increasingly included material from Bijnor town, and have recognised throughout our research the significance of links to other villages (for marriage migration) and wider afield (for labour migration to Delhi in particular, but also to Mumbai). In this paper we will review our use of ‘village (re)studies’ as a means not only of avoiding exoticisation but also of understanding villages as localities in a ‘globalizing’ world, and villagers as actors using their social capital beyond the village to negotiate meanings and strategies, with particular reference to child-bearing and schooling.

Paper Giver 3: Susan Wadley, Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University, USA

Paper 3 Title: Studying Karimpur: Localizing the Global

Paper Abstract: From the jeans now worn by young men (and rarely a young woman) to the televisions that blare away (in the two hours of electricity a day) to the consumption of shampoos and Dettol to young daughters working in cell phone factories in Delhi, globalization has come to India’s villages. Karimpur, in western Uttar Pradesh, has been studied for more than 75 years. Based on my own almost forty years of research in Karimpur, I focus here on issues of globalization and social change, and what we learn of ‘localization’ through the study of one village over time.

The global forces of modern capitalism are often critiqued for their power to create a homogenous world order, one that will erode the local cultures with which it comes into contact. Simply put, globalization can usefully be conceived of as the product of the linkages and interconnections between the states and societies which make up the modern world system. Although these linkages move ideas and traditions between first world and third world, and back, the consumer culture and cultural norms of the western (Euro-American) world have tended to dominate this cross-fertilization. But to believe in the all-consuming power of global forces is to deny any power and agency to local cultural traditions and to the people who enact them, to deny people’s abilities to accommodate, to resist, or to reject the ideals, symbols, practices, and goods emerging from the cultural and material ‘supermarket’ of the globalization process. As numerous scholars have pointed out, localization involves multiple, divergent interpretations of what is ‘global’. Rather, facets of a global culture provide new materials with which peoples can forge new identities and new traditions. Using case studies from the village known as Karimpur, I explore the myriad ways in which its residents are ‘localizing’ the global and in the process adopting new identities and traditions.

Paper Giver 4: Sally Steindorf, Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University, USA

Paper 4 Title: (still pending)

Paper Abstract: In the village of Kothariya (pop. 4,000), Rajasthan northwest of Udaipur, almost all of the families own their own televisions. Most families have just one channel, the government-subsidized Doordarshan, because it comes free through the antennae on top of their TVs. Those with more resources can purchase a satellite cable connection from the village’s local cable operator. This connection brings in an additional nine private channels.
Women in the village of Kothariya (pop. 4,000), Rajasthan, like watching soap operas in the afternoons. All morning they work: They make sweet, milky tea and the morning meal, fill buckets of cold water to bathe the children in, dress the children in uniforms and send them off to school, tidy their mostly one-room cement homes and finally bathe, after beating the family’s clothing clean with a wooden paddle. By the time 12 noon comes they are ready to hunker down for an hour and a half of soap operas about divorce, extra-marital affairs, and killings occurring in fictional urban upper middle class families, families whose moral values and lifestyles lie in stark contrast to their own. It is not that these women prefer to watch the urban upper classes on television, it is that almost all fictional programs on the private and government channels depict only these families. When asked, the women say they would prefer to watch people like themselves, of modest means who live in villages. Television directors and producers, however, are under the impression that villagers should be shown lives that they can aspire to materially (if only in imagination). As one director explained, “Nobody wants to watch what’s happening in and around you…They want to see a good house. They want to see good make-up. They want to see women wearing good saris…Because it’s all about aspirations at the end of the day.” This paper places Bombay television directors and producers in dialogue with television watchers in Kothariya in order to examine the uneasy middle ground that results, and to elucidate issues of class, wealth, rural/urban difference, and whether and how villages should be represented on television.

Paper Giver 5: Saurabh Dube, Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico

Paper 5 Title: Crops and flocks: Christian villages and evangelical entanglements

Paper Abstract: This paper shall discuss key articulations of the village within evangelical entanglements between Euro-American missionaries and Central-Indian converts. Focusing on the Chhattisgarh region from the 1860s through the 1960s, it will explore two distinct yet overlapping processes. On the one hand, pastoral idioms rooted in the Book centrally informed the evangelists’ establishment of Christian villages. These idioms contained diverse motifs -- so that, for example, the “crop” tended was also the “flock” shepherded -- and their careful unpacking reveals ambivalent extractions in Central India of proselytizing cultures in North America. On the other hand, the “native” converts themselves translated the missionary message and the Christian village as part of the making of an evangelical modernity. Tracking their apprehensions and actions suggests distinctive expression of the village within a Chhattisgarhi Christianity that was simultaneously vernacular and colonial. Together, such procedures do more than simply stress the interleaving of the “local” and the “global” and of the Indian village and a Western modern. Rather, they seize on these processes to unravel the village not only as an object of knowledge but as a condition of knowing.

Paper Giver 6: Diane Mines, Department of Anthropology, Appalachian State University, USA

Paper 6 Title: Fierce gods and the collocation of politics in a Tamil village

Paper Abstract: At powerful shrines to “fierce gods” located on village peripheries, the disenfranchised residents of a Tamil village strike their claim for inclusion in the center of village life, an inclusion which is also put forward as a hope for a future of social justice and egalitarianism in a “new” Tamil state. Fierce gods, I argue, are metonyms of a wider process of “collocation” through which the village is made and remade in relation to wider worlds. Most generally, through this paper I wish to explore a phenomenological approach to place and power, one which poses an alternative to a dichotomous or nested view of the “local” and the “global.” In this approach, we find that while the village matters most to those who occupy it, it matters also as site for understanding the centrality of place in human experience.

Paper Giver 7: Ishita Banerjee, Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico

Paper 7 Title: Sect and the Quotidian in Village Life

Paper Abstract: This paper will explore the impact of the dynamics of village life on the norms and practices of a subaltern religious order. Founded by a radical ascetic in the tributary states of Orissa in the 1860s, Mahima Dharma remains a significant presence in Orissa today. The precepts of the faith rule out the observation of the rules of caste and the norms of commensality by the adherents of Mahima Dharma. However, in their everyday lives, the lay followers of the faith have to carefully navigate between the demands of the village and the dictates of their Dharma to function both as members of the village community and as followers of a distinct sect. If at times ceremonies and festivals of the village oblige them to abide the rules of caste, rituals particular to the faith mark out the Mahima Dharmis as a distinct bounded community and confer on them a separate identity. The tensions and the push and pull acquire greater intensity in the case of women, particularly those born into families of adherents and married into families of non-adherents. I will examine these discrete constellations and subtle negotiations by focusing on two sets of villages: those initially settled by followers of Mahima Dharma and subsequently populated by other Hindus, and those where the Mahima Dharmis are few in number.

Paper Giver 8: William Sax, South-Asia Institute, Dept. of anthropology, University of Heidelberg, Germany

Paper 8 Title: Villages in the "Divine Kingdoms" of Rawain

Paper Abstract: Villages in the Rawain region of the Upper Tons River basin of Garhwal are organized according to a definite religious/political scheme. Social, political, and religious life in several of the local patti (traditional districts), focuses on the temple of the God, who rules the district as a ”Divine King.” The temple village is thus a kind of Capital, from which the God-King rules with his priests. There are separate villages for the God's Ministers (Vazir) and his Soldiers"(khund). In this paper, I argue that local villages function as parts of, and are understood in terms of this local system of ”Divine Kingship.”

Paper Giver 9: Ann Grodzins Gold, Departments of Religion and Anthropology, Syracuse University, USA

Paper 9 Title: Why sacred groves matter: Post-romantic claims

Paper Abstract: In diverse regions of India, from Kumaon to Kerala to Karnataka, exist thousands of mostly small forested areas surrounding built shrines or understood as spaces inhabited by gods or spirits. This much is undisputed. Such areas are commonly referred to in English as "sacred groves," although multiple terms -- specific to locality as well as language -- designate them variously. Within academia, eddies of sometimes testy controversy swirl around whether or not these areas have any sustainable ecological value today, and whether or not they ever did. To caricature extremes, some might claim that sacred groves offer evidence of Hinduism's uniquely benign environmental attitudes, and protect an invaluable treasure of biodiversity. Others assert that groves endure not a minute longer than it takes for people in their vicinity to find it economically expedient to take an ax to them, and that even those still standing have been much depleted. Of course, a more neutral and therefore nuanced middle ground has been fruitfully explored, but only occasionally with a strong focus on religious values and practices within the local communities most concerned. My paper reviews some of the contentious literature surrounding sacred groves, and then turns to ethnographic observations from forested shrines in rural Rajasthan. I attempt to describe the complex worlds of meaning these spaces harbor, where greenery is integral to pilgrimage practices focused on devotion, miracles, and above all healing. Villages matter because village narratives vastly complicate our academic stories.

Paper Giver 10: Bettina Weiz, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Paper 10 Title: A village in flux – water management and concepts of “village” in north Tamil Nadu

Paper Abstract: Assuming that one of the important features which constitute a village is the management of its material resources, this paper focuses on the arrangements to manage water - mainly for irrigation - in a locality in northern Tamil Nadu. It uses findings from fieldwork to discuss the “village-level systems of tank-management” and “traditional irrigation institutions” as put forward in a bulk of literature on irrigation in South India. Especially in the context of development studies, these tend to imply a certain image of a “village” that gives rise to hopes of the functioning of “village level” or “community based” institutions.
The paper argues that the nature of the irrigation institutions – however “traditional” or “village”-bound they might appear to be – is highly flexible. They are created and adapted according to the requirements of the day or of relations of power and probably borrowing from ideas and solutions that proved to be functional in other localities. And so are the local conceptions of the “village” itself. It is by this very flexibility and adaptability that a form of common irrigation management on the local level exists and continues to do so in ever changing social set-ups and with environmental transformations, and the same holds for conceptions of “village”.

Paper Giver 11: Nicolas Yazgi, Institute for Ethnology, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Paper 11 Title: “Village unity” as an instrumental resource: power & politics during regional elections in Jaunpur

Paper Abstract: The ideas of village solidarity, unity and reputation are important in the region of Jaunpur (Tehri Garhwal district, Uttaranchal State). They are embodied in many contexts ranging from the strongly ritualized to the informal. Far from being mere static “values” reproduced passively, they constitute resources likely to be manipulated in certain situations in order to pursue highly instrumental ends and legitimize power relations. Focused on the strategies of the inhabitants of a cluster of villages during the Pancayati Raj elections held in march 2003, this presentation will illustrate such a process.
Of particular interest are the ways internal dissent and long lasting feuds have been reduced through mutual compensation, social pressure, bluff and good will. This has been done in order to build the strongest position on the three different levels at which the elections took place (district, block, and village, for each of which villagers had different sets of priorities).
The strategies implemented touch several realms such as caste, kinship, gender, biography and formal politics or corruption. They also offer an insight into ways “democracy” might be localized, both shaped by and shaping the ever unfolding village politics.
In this context, the village is continually invoked as if it were an agent. A final question is thus: to what extent can this rhetoric be accounted for by the specific social organisation of Jaunpuri villages, and to what extent by other historical/conjunctural factors, including an emerging local “critique of modernity”?

Paper Giver 12: Roland Hardenberg, South-Asia Institute, Department of Anthropology, University of Heidelberg, Germany

Paper 12 Title: Marriage between Villages: villages as collective agents in Middle India

Paper Abstract: This presentation is based on 18 months of fieldwork among the Dongria Kond of Orissa, a so-called scheduled tribe populating the Niamgiri hill range of the Eastern Ghats. Dongria Kond often represent their own society as made up of clans inhabiting certain territories, but in practise villages, not clans, are the most important collective agents. Villages are identified in terms of their hill-gods, their earth goddesses, their ancestral places, the clans of their original inhabitants, their ritual relations and their territories including the forest used for swidden cultivation. Villages are interconnected by the kinship relations between gods, by an administration based on clan membership, by joint communal feasts, by intricate forms of friendship and by social and ritual co-operation. Villages are not self-sufficient units, although they show a certain degree of self-containedness in terms of cultivation, ritual and politics. But in many contexts, villages depend on the outside world, be this the market town in the plains or the affines from other villages who come to perform the buffalo sacrifice to the earth goddess. Moreover, as many villages are populated by members of a single exogamous clan, each village has to sustain a network of bride exchange. It will here be argued that unlike elsewhere in India, it is not joint families but rather villages that are the most important collective agents in what has been called “tribal” Middle India.

Paper Giver 13: Antje Linkenbach, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Heidelberg, Germany

Paper 13 Title: Memory, Territory and Identity: Constructing the Past in an Himalayan Village

Paper Abstract: I start from the basic assumption that Indian villages are not isolated entities but part of wider socio-political and religious networks of neighbouring settlements, often constituting a sub-region. Rather, they also relate to the even larger geo-political contexts of region, state, and nation.
Taking the example of a village in the Central Himalayas (Uttaranchal) I want to explore how territory and collective self are constructed by local residents through oral history and mythology. It is to discover that in this construction process “others” (neighbouring villages and their inhabitants, but also places and people of the “plains”) are an important point of reference. Narratives throw light upon

- the linkages and hierarchies between villages, jatis, clans, deities in a sub-region;
- the relation to natural resources (forest);
- aspects of collective and individual identity-formation.

The paper will furthermore argue that the reconstruction process is not simply a “recall” of events but is embedded in a particular context of interaction, formative for the way people memorize events and re-construct and re-present them. The paper will illustrate that the retrospective orientation has a prospective outlook: reconstructing the past is often directed to tackle present-day problems, deriving from the “modern” constellation (e.g. forest laws and restriction of access to the natural resources; new social hierarchies due to education and wealth, new administrative structures). It is meant to justify social strategies and ways of conduct as well as to guide social action of people concerned.

Panel report:

With the exception of Georg Pfeffer & Roland Hardenberg, all the papers listed on the website were presented (papers by Roger Jeffery and Patricia Jeffery, Susan Wadley, Sally Steindorf, Saurabh Dube, Diane Mines, Ishita Banerjee, William Sax, Ann Grodzins Gold, Bettina Weiz, Nicholas Yazgi, and Antje Linkenbach). In addition, a full introductory paper expanding on the intellectual argument of the panel was presented by co-conveners Diane Mines & Nicolas Yazgi.
We were able to manage time precisely, allowing twenty minutes for each presentation plus fifteen minutes for discussion after each paper. The discussions were challenging & lively (though frustratingly short) and led us beyond the inner world of each presentation to spawn a dialog addressing the general issues at stake. Discussions among panel members went on well beyond the limit of the panel itself, and are continuing further now.
Our initial aim was to use the conference as a first stage in a book project. We are currently moving on to the second stage: synthesizing what happened in Lund and transmitting the time, format & intellectual arguments to the contributors to this edited volume. In addition to those who presented at Lund, we will add a few contributions from scholars unable to attend the panel.
We want the process of producing the book to move forward without any gaps or delays. A first complete manuscript will be completed early in the Spring of 2005. We plan to use a North American publisher who can also distribute the book in South Asia. The book should be out by 2006.
On a personal note, the whole experience was both intellectually challenging and very pleasant. The panel audience was large and the feedback good.
Diane Mines & Nicolas Yazgi plan to organize a panel for the next ECMSAS.
Again, we wish to thank the organizers for providing such a stimulating and friendly setting for our work and encounters to unfold.