The Demands of Recognition

"In this remarkable ethnography, Townsend Middleton examines the recursive power of ethnographic classification by demonstrating anthropology's powerful role in the politics of postcolonial recognition in India. At once an ethnography of 'tribal' communities in Darjeeling and of the government anthropologists studying them, this dizzying hall of mirrors will provoke and unsettle."Akhil Gupta, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Red Tape "This book vividly stages the encounter between the ethnographic state and community politics in northeastern India. Middleton asks how and why a movement for regional sovereignty sought 'the tribal slot' to achieve recognition and redress. He finds the answer in anthropology. With lively prose and keen insight, he illuminates the unruly force of anthropological knowledge within postcolonial governance and rights."Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology and of South Asian Studies, Harvard University "The Demands of Recognition makes a major contribution to the understanding of contemporary indigenous cultural politics. Middleton has a gift for luminous ethnographic narrative and incisive theoretical formulations."James Clifford, University of California, Santa Cruz

Townsend Middleton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Becoming 'Tribal' in Darjeeling: An Introduction to the Ethno-Contemporary chapter abstractThis introduction lays out the book's designs for an anthropology of the ethno-contemporary. Calling on examples from the around the world, Middleton defines the ethno-contemporary as an arena of strugglewherein communities, governments, NGO's, the United Nations, and others are putting ethnology to old and new uses to reshape the prospects of marginalized and indigenous communities at the global level. Within India, the introduction covers the rising politics of affirmative action that have attended economic liberalization since the 1990s. Examining these escalating demands, Middleton elucidates the quandaries of late liberalism. Turning to Darjeeling, he further explains how the tribal movements of the 1990s and 2000s emerged out of a violent history of subnationalist struggle. Situating Darjeeling's tribal turn at this conjuncture of global, national, and local dynamics, the introduction thereby establishes the book's analytic frames, while introducing the communities and government anthropologists who feature throughout its chapters. 1A Searching Politics: Anxiety, Belonging, Recognition chapter abstractChapter 1 explores the shifting termsand energiesof identity and its politics. Blending historical and ethnographic analysis, the discussion moves from the colonial period to the bleeding-edge of subnationalism today to trace the unsettling histories, anxieties, and desires that animate life and politics at India's margins. The analysis reveals the deep-seated anxieties over belongingwhat Middleton calls anxious belongingsthat fuel Darjeeling's movements for recognition and autonomy. Through time, these anxieties over being-in and being-of India have made for a categorically searching politics, where the terms change but the conditions of exclusion remain troublingly the same. Historicizing the recent shift from Gorkha to tribal politics, Chapter 1 unearths the conditions driving communities into such intermittently violent and ethnological relations with the state and themselves. Doing so, it develops the tribal turn as a case study of the ethno-contemporary's global contours and intensely local forms. 2Durga and the Rock: A Colonial Category and its Discontents chapter abstractChapter 2 examines the origins of ethnological governmentality in India, focusing on the colonial history of tribal recognition. It uses ethnographic material to launch an historical investigation of how particular ethno-logicsin this case, the binary of castes vs. tribesbecome fixtures of state policy and the popular imagination. Middleton examines ethnology's checkered history in India to offer a new reading of 'colonialism and its forms of knowledge'. Despite the conspicuous coloniality of the category tribe, tribal recognition was seldom stable. Through archival readings, Middleton shows it was not epistemic hubris, but rather uncertainty that drove the know-and-rule rationalities of the British. Moving from history to the present-day, he illustrates how colonial knowledge and its uncertainties have come to shape the prospects of millions in postcolonial eraincluding the people of Darjeeling. This analysis consequently reveals the often-messy pasts that undergird the ethnologically affected present. 3Tribal Recognition: A Postcolonial Problem chapter abstractChapter 3 argues tribal recognition to be a postcolonial problem demanding postcolonial answers. After independence, tribal classification assumed a form and certainty eclipsing its colonial antecedents. Turning attention to these dynamics of postcolonial knowledge, power, and policy, Middleton asks how a troubled colonial category became a centerpiece of postcolonial social justice. The analysis moves from B.R. Ambedkar and the Constituent Assembly Debates of the 1940s, through