Paper short abstract:

Kinship and friendship endow persons with crucial material and immaterial resources such as solidarity and support. At the same time, the social proximity inherent in these constellations can be dangerous when intimate knowledge about kin and friends can be used against them - to one’s own advantage.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation provides an inquiry into family and 'community' relations among Nepalese night watchmen in Bangalore, Southern India. Numerous constellations of belonging are at play in these transnational social spaces. Migration puts substantial stress upon peers at the places of 'origin' while investing in their kith and kin going to work in distant places. Long-distance belonging is full of tensions, longing and predicaments that are fuelled at places of 'arrival'. Relations between migrants in Bangalore are largely structured by 'regimes of belonging' consisting of norms, intimate knowledge, and dense interactions. This contribution describes the scope of mutual support, but also the power of mistrust reigning in relations between friends and peers. It addresses instances of taking advantage from one another in the closely knitted 'local community'. The tensions between 'eternal' communal values on one hand and the possibilities of resistance on the other are of key-importance, here. The empirical insights of this case are a perfect illustration to Marc Granovetter's credo: "You always hurt the one you love".

Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates notions of (not-)belonging among Gurkha families. It looks at ex-Gurkhas who have retired from the Singapore Police Force and whose children were born and schooled in Singapore. I ask: (1) What is the character of belonging?; and (2) What are the politics of belonging?

Paper long abstract:

The Gurkhas, whose history of outmigration from Nepal to parts of Asia and elsewhere dates back to the British colonial period, have established themselves in former British colonies such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and India, including the U.K. In order to interrogate the migratory processes and the implications for Gurkha families, this paper deals with notions of belonging and not belonging. Specific attention is paid to retired Gurkhas of the Singapore Police Force and whose children were born and schooled in Singapore. Upon the retirement of their Gurkha fathers, the children would have to return to Nepal together, thereby truncating their education and stay. By exiting Singapore not based on one's choice, how do the children adapt to life in Nepal? What are the opportunities for education and employment amid various sociocultural adjustments and struggles to 'belong'? Two research queries guide my analyses: (1) What is the character of belonging?; and (2) What are the politics of belonging, and how do such politics shift over time, and across and within generations? The first problematic has to do with empirically realising what belonging (and by extension, not belonging) means to individual Gurkha family members. The second deals with the constraints and freedom that social actors operate within as they assess their own contexts of (not)-belonging. Such dynamics dovetail with claims or resistance involving inclusion and exclusion for retired Gurkhas and their families in Nepal, thereby elucidating the costs and fluidity of (not)-belonging after their protracted sojourn.

Paper short abstract:

The talk deals with the effects of the laws on conversion in several Indian states which define exclusive religious boundaries implying a potential loss of belonging on various levels. Drawing on fieldwork in Central India I highlight strategies of Christian leaders to reduce the costs of belonging.

Paper long abstract:

One way to inquire into what means the belonging to religious communities in India is the study of conversion. As a highly contested issue in India triggering public outcry and debates, conversion commonly involves a new range of attachments, but it also might challenge different forms of belonging like families, castes or ritual communities of neighborhoods. Additionally to a social bias against conversion we find legal restrictions in several states of the Indian Union. Laws like the Freedom of Religion Acts institutionalize and legalize decisions on what is a correct or an undue conversion. Moreover, they allow organized groups to check events which they perceive as threatening and to put a regime of scrutiny on the potential converts and the people who perform rites of community transgression like baptism. By reverence to conversion to Christianity I aim to explicate how the legal setting effectively not only defines religious boundaries but also severs bonds of belonging while ruling out their combination with the newly acquired religious affiliation. These provisions force the concerned parties to calculate the risks of conversion. Drawing on fieldwork in central India I demonstrate the strategies of lowering the costs of belonging maintained by Christian leaders when faced with the legal requirements.

Paper short abstract:

My paper is the outcome of an ethnographic research carried out in two slums of Ahmedabad, India, amongst Dalit women who roll the agarbatti and who undergo the complex politics of structural inequities beyond constitutional rights granted by law.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decades the Dalits started moving to the public sphere and to an extent they became synonymous with Dalit public figures such a Mayawati, the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party, who born in UP in the Dalit caste of Chamar embarked on a polemic political career which culminated on being the first Dalit women chief minister. Dalit women activists have taken this role forward, and Dalit cultural assertion in the literary field is noteworthy.

However, this ever-expanding Dalit affirmative action cannot be conflated with the "regular" Dalit woman who delve in the shadows of politics and whose sense of belonging to the broader nation - and even to a national Dalit movement - is deeply compromised by social discrimination and segregation.

My paper will be grounded on a fieldwork carried out among Dalit women who leave in a slum of Ahmedabad, and who constitute a marginalized community whose sense of belonging is rooted on socially exclusive rather than on inclusive citizenship.

Paper short abstract:

Only trained Bardeuris (Brahmans who have hereditary rights over the Kāmākhyā Temple) can worship the Goddess Kāmākhyā; for those who are not trained, arrangements are put in place to ensure the worship. This paper examines the controversial opinions of the Bardeuris around these arrangements.

Paper long abstract:

The Brahmans having hereditary rights over the Kāmākhyā Temple call themselves Bardeuri (The Great Priests). In order to perform the daily pūjā for the Goddess, a Bardeuri needs to be initiated and instructed by his seniors; this process is usually described by the adjective kaṭhin (hard, difficult). At the end of the training period, each Bardeuri will be recognized as a pujārī and will be allowed to perform the daily rituals. The Bardeuris who undergo the demanding pujārī-training are often pushed by their families. However, today, only few Bardeuris are pujārīs. When their turn comes, the Bardeuris who are not pujārīs delegate the performance of the daily rituals to an eligible fellow-Bardeuri. This does not affect their hereditary rights. Nevertheless, a sense of inadequacy emerged when I interviewed a Bardeuri who delegated the worship. A gap exists between what people do and what people think they should do; this paper focuses precisely on this gap.

Their exclusive rights make Bardeuris the unique guardians of the worship to be rendered to the Goddess (and entail significant social and economical privileges). In this paper I argue that even if it is accepted that a Bardeuri may avoid what is considered to be his community responsibility, it is not possible to ignore such responsibility. Despite the contradictions that have been described, worshipping the Goddess is considered by Bardeuris the raison d'être of their community.

Paper short abstract:

India-Bangladesh enclaves offer a study of identity formation and how it plays with the sense of belonging. For enclave dwellers geographically bound in one nation while being the citizens of another, multiplicities of self-hood are unfolded with a contested sense of territory and allegiance.

Paper long abstract:

Encompassed within the boundaries of one nation while being historically a part of another, enclaves open the discussion around the sense of belonging. The India-Bangladesh enclaves in particular underline both the liminal identity held within the enclave and the tension felt upon trying to merge it with the mainland. In light of the recent Land Boundary Agreement granting citizenship rights to the country of their preference, it is interesting to note that while the erstwhile stateless people desire integration, this incorporation has caused an unease within the mainland population.

On the Indian side, the public imaginary shades the 'new citizens' as units of threat to national security and culture. The movement of the enclave people is not uniform within itself, and often throws up witnesses to differing experiences as a Hindu and as a Muslim on an individual level. By focusing on the resettlement camps at Haldibari, Mekhliganj and Dinhata in Cooch Behar district, the paper inquires into how the relocated people's sense of self along the axes of language, religion, and ethnicity is constantly challenged by the collective they wish to enter and how in turn the collective demands differing measures of allegiance as the price of belonging. Built on field research comprising of personal testaments, video interviews and photographs, the paper scrutinizes the intra-group dynamics that complicates incorporations into a community one holds to be historically one's own and the individual arbitrations within the claims of collective belonging.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the Monpas, an ethnic minority straddling the borders between Tibet, India and Bhutan, narrate Tibetan and Bhutanese origins to articulate transnational belonging.

Paper long abstract:

If common origins or "blood" is the basis for articulating "long-distance nationalism" (Glick Schiller 2005) or nationalism across borders, in some cases they also become negatively marked for the same reasons. Non-national or hybrid origins may be seen as potential threats to the idea of the nation in homogenous constructions of nationalism. How do minorities inhabiting disputed border areas navigate this conflicted terrain of origins in articulating cultural identity?

In this paper, I show how the Monpas, an ethnic minority straddling the borders between Tibet, India and Bhutan, narrate Tibetan and Bhutanese origins to articulate transnational belonging. Yet, given that the Monpas inhabit a disputed territory in an unresolved border dispute between India and China, stories of trans-border and particularly, Tibetan, origins have become a contentious issue, entangled with questions of national belonging. Drawing on oral narratives of origins and migration collected during fieldwork in west Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India between 2008 and 2010, I look at how people position themselves through narration of origins.

My attempt is not to find a conclusive answer as to the origins of Monpas, but to see how people in a disputed border are aware of the costs of articulating transnational kinship; and use different narrative devices to assert national belonging.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores different types of political defection in the context of contemporary student activism in New Delhi. If "belonging" to a group involves a social cost for the individual, to be removed from it implies one too.

Paper long abstract:

Usually scholars are keener on knowing the processes by which actors participate to social movements and are less interested in knowing how these commitments fade away or disappear altogether. This is particularly the case of research on Indian campus activism, an activity requiring a high degree of implication − often detrimental to one's own academic performance. Taking as object of study the case of political leadership in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, this paper argues that both individual and collective demobilization can be best understood in terms of "trusting discontinuity". The magnitude of such distrust has to be sufficient to overcome the constraints student organisations put on defection. The major loss faced by the former activists is undoubtedly the loss of "political friendships".

Though providing in-depth ethnographic evidence I identify three major types of disengagement. The first one is the "organisational split" arising when an intense ideological schism shaken the core of a student organisation. The second one is the act of "turning passive" occurring when activists, for various reasons, distance themselves from the political structure they were part of without engaging in an open conflict. The third one is the "continuing of activism by other means". It concerns individuals who leave participatory student politics (often because they graduate of drop out) but see their new professional activity as a continuum of their former engagement. Another case, such as joining a rival organisation, is also a possibility but the latter does not implies necessarily a form of disengagement.

Paper short abstract:

Inspired by M. Hénaff’s work I will reflect on the notions of gift and sacrifice. I will argue that they seem to be more adequate to grasp the ambivalence of belonging - a socio-relational concept -, than the term “price” - a signifier of detachment due to its proximity to money.

Paper long abstract:

Belonging signifies the existence of social obligations and emotional ties of individuals in relation to (collective) others. While, thus, belonging presupposes a particular social positionality and certain constraints in outlook and action, it also involves openness and desire to experience something new, to develop, improve, transform oneself and probably one's context. Be-longing always implies a choice to define what one wants to be(-come) and to act accordingly. Yet, both, living up to one's aspirations as well as restricting or forfeiting them does not come without "costs", it has its "price".

Although I am aware that the notion of "price" can be and is used in a metaphorical sense in the context of the panel, I think we need to see here a question mark and ask if we really need an "economic" vocabulary to describe what individuals have to give, what they must forego in order to belong. Inspired by M. Hénaff's work on "le prix de la verité" (2002) I want to reflect on the concepts of gift and sacrifice. I will argue that they seem to be more adequate to grasp the ambivalence of belonging (in its core a socio-relational concept) than the term "price", which due to its proximity to money signifies detachment and is considered as "a tool of freedom" (Hénaff).

I will substantiate my reflections with ethnographic references drawn from my research in Central Himalayan villages and on social movements in the region.