Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper unpacks the conservation debate in light of the top-down environmental policy initiatives implemented for the Mising tribal habitat in the Majuli island of Assam, India. It establishes that the statist conservation policies based on fixity disrupt the everyday life of the islanders.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork in the Majuli island in the northeast Indian state of Assam. It focuses on the Mising tribe, an environmentally and socially vulnerable community in the island. It understands the community’s traditional relationship with water. In the era of top-down conservation policy initiatives, the study looks at the human-nature interface in light of the state-sponsored climate coping mechanisms. It attempts to understand the interaction of the ‘scientificity’ claim of statist interventions with the indigenous knowledge of the Misings in coping with environment-induced threats. The paper revisits the colonial imagination that equated stability with land. This morphed to ownership of land as a requisite to claim legitimacy of residence in the post-colonial nation-state. This, in turn, is juxtaposed with permanence as a criterion to claim legitimate belonging. The Misings, on the other hand, are nomadic communities whose lifeworlds have been shaped by fragility and impermanence. The paper, therefore, questions ‘fixity’, a determinant to certify belonging and further understands how this is reflected in most conservation initiatives. While floods may be frequent events in Majuli, the residents have intimate relationships with water (Lahiri–Dutt and Samanta 2013). It is hence characterised by belonging and intimacy and not much by hostilities. The paper looks into how the indigenous communities account for these initiatives and how these, in turn, impose fixity on their habitats. Hence, it disrupts their lifeworlds, discouraging movement, which is justified by the state that capitalises on land as a reference to legitimise habitation and residence.