The Body of the Land : Women, Ethnicity, and Alter-Politics

• The Khasi people in Northeast India follow matrilineal decent and land and other assets are passed on through the female line with the youngest daughter as main inheritor and guardian of ancestral property. For some time material inheritance has been questioned by various Khasi organizations dominated by the male political elite arguing that the survival of a small indigenous tribe is at stake claiming that outsiders target Khasi women to get access to land and hence by-pass regulations debarring non-tribals from holding land in the state of Meghalaya. Most recently, this took a most ugly turn with the male dominated district council proposing a law through which women who would marry non-Khasis would lose their status as Scheduled Tribes and hence the privileges that comes with the Scheduled Tribe (ST) status and furthermore that the children of such a marriage would be considered non-Khasis. The proposed bill has created a major uproar, condemned by leading women’s organization and others. In this paper we will discuss the Bill and how in the name of indigenous survival, the key institution of the Khasi society, i.e. matriliny, is being severely undermined. Control of land is here turned into control of women’s bodies and sexuality. As we will discuss further, a major impetus to the scramble over land and the exclusion of women are the extractive economy dominated by the very same indigenous elite. That an increasing number of Khasi people no longer have access to land is another critical aspect that is being silenced by the dominant lobby groups who focus on the threat posed by outsiders. To analyse these developments we introduce the notion of vernacular politics, suggesting that this is a domain of the political that is intertwined with transnational indigenous politics, yet with a difference. As we further suggests, the critique against the Bill brings forth what we, along with Ghassan Hage, term “alter-politics”.       

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi -- Socialantropologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology -- Social Anthropology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Khasi

Lineage Amendment Bill 2018

matriliny

vernacular politics

indigenous sovereignty

alter-politics

Social Anthropology

socialantropologi

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