What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine’s Remains ...chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine’s Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire. “Written in a deeply engaging and accessible style, this pathbreaking book explores the world of plantation laborers, whose voices are either hidden or silenced in scholarly literature on economic botany.” — ROHAN DEB ROY, author of Malarial Subjects “Accounts of science and empire describe the centrality of cinchona to the colonial project in India, but we know little about what came after. Quinine’s Remains is an ethnographically rich and thoroughly readable story of what it means to live in the wake of medical innovation on contemporary cinchona plantations.” — SARAH BESKY, author of Tasting Qualities
In this article, I ask how state ethnography deploys, demands, and ultimately instantiates the ethnological forms of a particular multicultural order. Extending recent interests in paraethnographics, ...I take as my "object" the interface of state ethnography itself. Specifically, I examine an ethnographic survey government anthropologists conducted in Darjeeling to determine the eligibility of ten ethnic groups seeking recognition as Scheduled Tribes of India. Refiguring the proverbial encounter of anthropologists and tribes, I interrogate the real-time dynamics through which both sides negotiate, take up, and take on normative ethnological paradigms—thus actualizing the ethno-logics of Indian multiculturalism within and, indeed, beyond the classificatory moment.
Since the British colonial period anthropology has been central to policy in India. But today, while the Indian state continues to use ethnography to govern, those who were the "objects" of study are ...harnessing disciplinary knowledge to redefine their communities, achieve greater prosperity, and secure political rights.In this groundbreaking study, Townsend Middleton tracks these newfound "lives" of anthropology. Offering simultaneous ethnographies of the people of Darjeeling's quest for "tribal" status and the government anthropologists handling their claims, Middleton exposes how minorities are—and are not—recognized for affirmative action and autonomy. We encounter communities putting on elaborate spectacles of sacrifice, exorcism, bows and arrows, and blood drinking to prove their "primitiveness" and "backwardness." Conversely, we see government anthropologists struggle for the ethnographic truth as communities increasingly turn academic paradigms back upon the state. The Demands of Recognition offers a compelling look at the escalating politics of tribal recognition in India. At once ethnographic and historical, it chronicles how multicultural governance has motivated the people of Darjeeling to ethnologically redefine themselves—from Gorkha to tribal and back. But as these communities now know, not all forms of difference are legible in the eyes of the state. The Gorkhas' search for recognition has only amplified these communities' anxieties about who they are—and who they must be—if they are to attain the rights, autonomy, and belonging they desire.
This article rethinks the relationship between connectivity and security through an ethnography of India's notorious Siliguri Corridor - the 'Chicken's Neck'. This narrow stretch of territory funnels ...myriad goods and bodies between India's 'mainland', its North-East, and beyond to China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Southeast Asia. Pipelines, railways, smugglers, migrants, and militants all pass through this tight space. Vital yet vulnerable, the corridor demands circulation and security. This article explores how these fraught imperatives structure - and constrain - chokepoint life and movement. It turns attention to chokepoint pragmatics: the everyday ways of getting through and getting by in the constricted arteries of the present. Chronicling how traffickers and regulators alike 'work' the corridor to il/licit ends, the analysis shows how chokepoint pragmatics play upon and ultimately produce connective insecurity. As logistics reformats life across the planet, chokepoint ethnography here reveals the dynamics that render us connected - yet vulnerable - like never before.
ABSTRACT
This article explores the aftermath of quinine in India. Derived from cinchona, the fever tree, quinine was once malaria's only remedy—and, as such, vital to colonial power. But it has left ...grave uncertainty in its wake. Today, little market exists for Indian quinine, but government cinchona plantations established by the British remain in Darjeeling. What will become of these dilapidated plantations and their 50,000 inhabitants is unclear. Crumbling quinine factories and overgrown cinchona may evoke ruination, but these remains are not dead. They have instead become the site of urgent efforts—and a periodically charged politics—to redefine land and life for the twenty‐first century. This essay develops an analytics of becoming‐after to ask not only, how do empires and human beings become‐with world‐historical substances like quinine but also, what do we make of life after they run their course?
Across South Asia and beyond, the politics of belonging continue to breed alarming volatility and violence. The embodied, affective dimensions of these politics remain an imminent concern. In this ...article, I question how anxiety informs these reckonings of who belongs and who does not. Capable of galvanizing bodies and the greater body politic, anxieties over national belonging remain a powerful, but less understood, political force. In Darjeeling, India, anxieties over belonging–what I term "anxious belongings"–have fueled a particularly mercurial subnationalist politics, involving recurrent agitations for a separate state of Gorkhaland. Situated amid these interplays of anxiety, politics, and belonging, I identify anxious belonging as a collectively embodied phenomenon–at once historical, social, and pregnant with political possibility. As I show, these anxieties are deeply rooted in body and time. Today, they remain as unsettling as they are formative of a people and their politics. Thinking anthropologically about the origins and sociopolitical life of anxiety in Darjeeling, with this article I signal new ways of understanding–and perhaps anticipating–the volatilities that attend the politics of belonging worldwide. Anxious belonging accordingly comes into view as a dimension of and potential for markedly agitated forms of life and politics. A través de Asia del Sur y mas allá, la política de pertenencia continúa generando, una inestabilidad y violencia alarmantes. Las dimensiones representadas, afectivas de estas políticas permanecen como una preocupación inminente. En este artículo cuestiono cómo la ansiedad influye en las consideraciones de quien pertenece y quien no. Capaz de incitar cuerpos y una entidad política más grande, las ansiedades sobre pertenencia nacional continúan siendo una poderosa fuerza política pero poco entendida. En Darjeeling, India, ansiedades sobre pertenencia–lo que llamo "pertenencias ansiosas"–han avivado una política sub-nacional particularmente volátil envolviendo recurrentes agitaciones por el estado separatista de Gorkhaland. Situada en el medio de estas interacciones de ansiedad, política y pertenencia, identifico pertenencia ansiosa como un fenómeno colectivamente corpóreo-a la vez histórico, social, y concebido con posibilidad política. Como demuestro, estas ansiedades están profundamente arraigadas en cuerpo y tiempo. Hoy ellas continúan siendo inestables en la medida en que influyen en la gente y su política. Pensando antropológicamente sobre los orígenes y la vida socio-política de la ansiedad en Darjeeling, con este artículo indico nuevas maneras de entender–y quizás anticipar–las inestabilidades que están presentes en la política de pertenencia a través del mundo. Pertenencia ansiosa, por consiguiente aparece como una dimensión de y potencial para formas de vida y política marcadamente agitadas.
Written against the backdrop of Darjeeling's 2017 Gorkhaland agitation, this essay chronicles the colonialisations-first British, now Bengali-that undergird this subnationalist struggle. The analysis ...challenges romanticised views of Darjeeling, presenting instead a case study of internal colonialism. As an exercise in post-colonial thought, it leverages the view from Darjeeling to explore a notable lacuna in our reckonings of subalternity. A place long thought to be 'above it all' here begs its own history from below. Heeding Gorkhaland's call, the essay proposes 'provincialising Bengal' as a means to productively address the internal colonialism at hand, and therein rethink Bengal and its peripheries.
Assassinations are an unsettling feature of South Asian politics. Haunting the body politic in spectacular and spectral forms, these deaths have an uncanny way of transforming political life. This ...article turns attention to the afterlives of these killings in order to explore the semiotic and sociopolitical technologies through which assassinations—and public killings of other kinds—
. Introducing
as the necrotic equivalent to the
distinction that has been central to the study of biopolitics, the article plots a pursuit of—and analytics for—the unruly forms of death and killing among us today. Figured against a backdrop of expanding homicidal forms (including algorithmic drone strikes, web-streamed beheadings, suicide bombings, etc.), assassinations prove a particularly timely—if scary—problem to consider. Assassinations put to us urgent questions about not just how we live
the horrors of political killings but also how we live
them.
This article critically rethinks the possibilities and paradoxes of identity at the interstices of South Asia. Through ethnographic and historical analyses, I chronicle the varying forms, ...(dis)contents, and failures of ethnic identity in the geo-politically sensitive region of Darjeeling, India. In this Himalayan corner of the nation-state, borders have proven simultaneously generative yet undermining of identity and its politics—at once amplifying communities' desires for national inclusion, while rendering them largely unable to meet the Indian state's criteria for national recognition. As is the case along India's other borders, anxieties over national belonging have subsequently spawned violent subnationalist agitations in Darjeeling, as well as more legal quests for right, recognition, and autonomy. But to little avail. A perennial ‘identity crisis’ thus haunts (and charges) the people and politics of this Himalayan borderland. Refiguring the crisis at hand, this paper asks how certain forms of human difference become viable identities in India, while others do not. Doing so, I locate the crisis not within the realm of identity, but rather its rightful recognition. The paper accordingly develops ‘states of difference’ as an analytic for understanding the accentuated, paradoxical interplays of identity, state, and difference at the borders of South Asia and beyond.
► Border identities are fraught with agitation, crisis, and failure. ► The politics and paradoxes of recognition are especially acute at South Asian borders. ► Borders both mark and make difference—ethnic, national, and otherwise.
Research assistants have long been central to ethnographic practice, yet the conventions of academic labor have left their roles under-stated and obscure. The implications, we opine, are both ...theoretical and practical. Writing research assistants back in to our collective considerations of the method does more than simply fill a lacuna in the 'reflexive turn'. It opens windows onto a radically transformed field of ethnographic practice. Today, the 'field' appears neither where nor what it used to be. Ethnographers are exploring ever-new terrains—many of them emergent, unstable, and dangerous. These endeavors, in turn, are prompting new kinds of research relationships. Against this backdrop, the time is now for a critical reappraisal of the players of contemporary ethnography. Venturing a new calculus of reflexive thinking, this Introduction engages the research assistant to revisit core ethnographic concerns—among them: research in dangerous places; the ethics of ethnographic labor; the shifting differentials of 'academic vs. native' expertise; and the socially produced nature of the 'field' itself. As the articles and Introduction of this special issue show, research assistants unsettle conventional understandings of what ethnography is and can be. Readmitted to the conversation, they provide a unique look into ethnography's current state of play—and glimpses of the method's future possibilities.
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