Entangled Lives
This book considers three questions about understanding the past. How can we rethink human histories by including animals and plants? How can we overcome nationally territorialised narratives? And how can we balance academic history-writing and indigenous understandings of history? This is a tentative foray into the connections between these questions. Entangled Lives explore t...
This book considers three questions about understanding the past. How can we rethink human histories by including animals and plants? How can we overcome nationally territorialised narratives? And how can we balance academic history-writing and indigenous understandings of history? This is a tentative foray into the connections between these questions. Entangled Lives explore them for a large area that has seldom been explored in academic inquiry. The 'Eastern Himalayan Triangle' includes both uplands and lowlands. The region is the meeting point of three global biodiversity hotspots connecting India and China across Myanmar/Burma, Bangladesh and Bhutan. The 'Triangle' is treated as a multispecies site in which human histories have always been utterly intertwined with plant and animal histories. It foregrounds that history is co-created – it is always interspecies history – but that its contours are locally specific.
Joy L. K. Pachuau is a historian and anthropologist with an interest in Northeast India, gender studies, and the history of Christianity in Asia. Her recent works include Landscape, Culture and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India (2019, ed. with Neeladri Bhattacharya), Christianity in India: Issues of Culture, Power and Knowledge (2016, ed. with Tanika Sarkar et a...
Joy L. K. Pachuau is a historian and anthropologist with an interest in Northeast India, gender studies, and the history of Christianity in Asia. Her recent works include Landscape, Culture and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India (2019, ed. with Neeladri Bhattacharya), Christianity in India: Issues of Culture, Power and Knowledge (2016, ed. with Tanika Sarkar et al.). She was awarded the Sneh Mahajan Prize for the best book in modern Indian history for 2012–14 by the Indian History Congress for her monograph Being Mizo, Identity and Belonging in Northeast India, 2014.
Willem van Schendel works in the fields of history, anthropology, and sociology of Asia. Recent books include: The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (2015, with Joy L.K. Pachuau); A History of Bangladesh (new edition, 2020); and Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces: Histories of Networking and Border Crossing (2022, ed. with Gunnel Cederlöf). His publications can be found at uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel.