Books by Jelle J P Wouters
Woven together as a text of humanities-based environmental research outcomes, Himalayan Climes an... more Woven together as a text of humanities-based environmental research outcomes, Himalayan Climes and Multispecies Encounters hosts a collection of historical and fieldwork-based case studies and conceptual discussions of climate change in the greater Himalayan region.
The collective endeavour of the book is expressed in what the editors characterize as the clime studies of the Himalayan multispecies worlds. As a terrestrial concept, the individual case studies concretize the abstract concept of climate change in their place- and culturally-specific correlations of weather, climate pattern, and landscape change. Supported by empirical and historical findings, the concept in each chapter showcases climate change as clime change. As place, clime is discerned as both a recipient of and a contributor to climate change over time in the Himalayan context. It affirms climate change as multispecies encounters, as part of multifaceted cultural processes, and as ecologically-specific environmental changes in the more-than-human worlds of the Himalayas.
As the case studies complement, enrich, and converse with natural scientific understandings of Himalayan climate change, this book offers students, academics, and the interested public fresh approaches to the interdisciplinary field of climate studies and policy debates on climate change and sustainable development.
Storying Multipolar Climes of the Himalaya, Andes and Arctic: Anthropocenic Climate and Shapeshifting Watery Lifeworlds, 2023
This book initiates multipolar climate/clime studies of the world's altitudinal and latitudinal h... more This book initiates multipolar climate/clime studies of the world's altitudinal and latitudinal highlands with terrestrial, experiential, and affective approaches. Framed in the environmental humanities, it is an interdisciplinary, comparative study of the mutually-embodied relations of climate, nature, culture, and place in the Himalaya, Andes, and Arctic. Innovation-driven, the book offers multipolar clime case studies through the contributors' historical findings, ethnographic documentations, and diverse conceptualizations and applications of clime, an overlooked but returning notion of place embodied with climate history, pattern, and changes. The multipolar clime case studies in the book are geared toward deeper, lively explorations and demonstrations of the translatability, interchangeability, and complementarity between the notions of clime and climate. "Multipolar" or "multipolarity" in this book connotes not only the two polar regions and the tectonically shaped highlands of the earth but also diversely debated perspectives of climate studies in the broadest sense. Contributors across the twelve chapters come from diverse fields of social and natural sciences and humanities, and geographically specialize, respectively, in the Himalayan, Andean, and Arctic regions. The first comparative study of climate change in altitudinal and latitudinal highlands, this will be an important read for students, academics, and researchers in environmental humanities, anthropology, climate science, indigenous studies, and ecology.
The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the e... more The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia.
Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context.
What characterizes the Naga kin universe? What was lost and gained as Nagas transitioned from a s... more What characterizes the Naga kin universe? What was lost and gained as Nagas transitioned from a stateless to a state society? What happens to a society when long entrenched in political conflict, violence, and brutality? What is the place of Naga traditions and customs in the contemporary historical moment? What are the political paths and possibilities that fork off into the future? With Nagapolis: A Community Portrait, Jelle J.P. Wouters addresses these and related questions through a varied range of topical essays, from feasting to factionalism, customs to cuisine, prophecy to politics, and colonialism to capitalism. Delving deep in history, politics, culture, and social mores, Nagapolis traces and places Naga society, relating changes, continuities, and changing continuities, to ultimately ask, just what is the Naga community all about?
State and Capital reign over the Age of Sorrow. We face inequality, pandemics, ethnocide, climate... more State and Capital reign over the Age of Sorrow. We face inequality, pandemics, ethnocide, climate crisis, and mass extinction. Our desire for security and power governs us as State. Our desire for possessions governs us as Capital. Our desires imprison and rule us beings as Unbeing. Yet, from Nagaland to New Zealand, Bhutan to Bolivia, a second wave of anti-colonial revolutions has begun. Arising from assemblies of humans and other-than-humans, these revolutions replace possessive individualism with non-exploitative interdependence. Naga elders, Bhutanese herders and other indigenous communities, feminists, poets, seers, yaks, cranes, vultures, and fungi haunt this pamphlet. The original Subaltern Studies narrated how Indian peasant communities destroyed the British empire. Subaltern Studies 2.0 prophesies the multi-being demos and liberates Being from Unbeing. Re-kin, Re-nomad, Re-animate, Re-wild! The Animist Revolution has come.
The Routledge Companion to Northeast India is a trans-disciplinary and comprehensive compendium o... more The Routledge Companion to Northeast India is a trans-disciplinary and comprehensive compendium of a vital yet under-researched region in South Asia. It provides a unique guide to prevailing themes, theories, arguments, and history of Northeast India by discussing its life-forms – human and not – languages, landscapes, and lifeways in all its diversity and difference. The volume contains authoritative entries from leading specialists from and on the region and offers clear, concise, and illuminating explanations of key themes and ideas.
A hands-on, practical, and comprehensive guide to Northeast India, this book fills a significant gap in the literature and will be an invaluable teaching, learning and research resource for scholars and students of Northeast India Studies, South Asian and Southeast Asian societies, culture, politics, humanities, and the social sciences in general.
Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, anim... more Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays and an Afterword by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.
This book explores the form and character of political and social life in Nagaland. Firmly ground... more This book explores the form and character of political and social life in Nagaland. Firmly grounded in the historical experiences and ethnographic specifics of Naga society, its eleven essays variously discuss the origins, evolution and convolutions of the Naga Movement for self-determination, the ways Naga villagers apply their agency and imagination to appropriate and rework India’s democracy process to their own uses and lifeworlds, kinship networks and the social formation of tribes, and the politics of place and identity. This book will be of interest both to students of contemporary Naga society and to those interested in Highland Asia, political anthropology, kinship and tribes, insurgency, and conceptual politics and sociology more widely.
In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency is a fine-grained critique of the Naga struggle for political r... more In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency is a fine-grained critique of the Naga struggle for political redemption, the state’s response to it, and the social corollaries and carry-overs of protracted political conflict on everyday life. Offering an ethnographic underview, Jelle Wouters illustrates an ‘insurgency complex’ that reveals how embodied experiences of resistance and state aggression, violence and volatility, and struggle and suffering link together to shape social norms, animate local agitations, and complicate inter-personal and inter-tribal relations in expected and unexpected ways. It thus presses us to rethink our views on tribalism, conflict and ceasefire, development, corruption, and democratic politics
The title of this book; ‘Nagas in the 21st Century’, is both an adaptation and a (modest) self-pr... more The title of this book; ‘Nagas in the 21st Century’, is both an adaptation and a (modest) self-proclaimed sequel to Verrier Elwin’s (1969) iconic Nagas in the Nineteenth Century. In this anthology, Elwin introduces and brings together a collection of administrative reports, tour diaries, and ethnographic descriptions on Naga tribes, all written in the 19th century. During the colonial era, Naga tribes became an ethnological hotbed, arguably even a cradle of British Social Anthropology. Back then, writings on Nagas were many, varied and colourful, and included rituals and religion, political structures and sentiments, taboos and omens, dress and ornaments, funeral customs, head-hunting, monolithic cultures, and so on. This ubiquity of colonial accounts, however, contrasts starkly with the scant material generated during the post-colonial period. In fact, as a corollary of the protracted Indo-Naga conflict scholars working on Nagas now grapple with a decades-wide ethnographic void. The contributors to this book take Elwin’s anthology, or other colonial sources, as a point of reference, and then link these texts to their own areas of research, offering critiques, comparisons, and contrasts as they proceed. Taken together, the chapters offer a set of insights and new departures into the study of contemporary Naga society.
Articles by Jelle J P Wouters
Like human working classes, animal workers also constantly resist and rebel. In the age of the cl... more Like human working classes, animal workers also constantly resist and rebel. In the age of the climate crisis and sixth mass extinction, we urgently need socialist theory that recognizes these animal workers as central to socio-economic production. We require theories of multispecies production and exchange, of multispecies class struggle. We must rethink socialist revolution as multispecies emancipation.
Rural - predominantly agrarian - areas in Bhutan are experiencing two
concurrent trends, namely:... more Rural - predominantly agrarian - areas in Bhutan are experiencing two
concurrent trends, namely: 1) extensive out-migration, particularly among
the youth, either to urban centres such as Thimphu or Phuentsholing, or
to international destinations like Australia, and 2) anthropogenic climate
change that adversely affect agricultural returns, or that require innovation
in terms of crop selection and farming techniques. Migration and climate change are usually studied separately in Bhutan, with migration rarely appearing in climate reports and vice versa. The National Adaptation Plan (2023) mentions “migration” just once, focusing on wildlife, with no reference to human migration. A government report on migration mentions climate change only once, linking it to urban sustainability goals (NSB, 2018). However, fresh research examines how climate change increasingly drives migration patterns, and its effects on both origin and destination places. Migration driven by climate change is estimated to increase as the effects of climate change become more pronounced. This is particularly relevant for Bhutan, which is particularly susceptible to the adverse impacts of climate change.
Drawing on ethnography and conceptual scholarship in the environmental
humanities, this article ... more Drawing on ethnography and conceptual scholarship in the environmental
humanities, this article proffers two perspectives and a suggestion for
attaining a historically and culturally situated engagement with climate
change in Bhutan. I adopt (1) a Deep Time perspective to present Bhutan’s mountains as geological makers of climate and as earth-regulators of indigenous environmental flows (of water, sediment, soil) that enable and nourish life in both higher and lower altitudes and alluvial plains. I then draw on an ethnographic narrative to posit that (2) anthropogenic
climate change, as it encounters Bhutanese cosmologies and wisdom
traditions, is not morally neutral – as the climate sciences may apprehend
it – but is experienced, interpreted and responded to by Bhutanese
communities as the (un)doings of a living, listening and agential landscape. his then leads me to call for (3) a more situated, more capacious, and more inclusive study of climate change in Bhutan that complements the globally dominant technical-secular-scientific sense of climate change
In the early 19th century, the expanding British Raj encountered the Patkai Mountains and surroun... more In the early 19th century, the expanding British Raj encountered the Patkai Mountains and surrounding hilly areas. These lands were inhabited by Naga clans, villages, and tribes that had long successfully resisted the encroachments of lowland states based in Assam, Manipur, and Burma. After consolidating their hold over the Assam plains, the British Raj began to view the Naga-populated hills as a vast, stateless, and unruly expanse that obstructed their overland communications and trade with the Chinese and Burmese Empires. This viewpoint set in motion a gradual, uneven, and fragmented process of colonial expansion in the hills, which involved different Naga tribes at various intervals and resulted in separate administrative approaches. When British rule came to an end in 1947, Nagas were enclosed in four main political divisions. In addition, there existed a large swathe of Nagainhabited land that had never been formally annexed by the British Raj. At the heart of Nagas' multiple processes of state enclosure was the creation of two Naga Hills Districts, one on either side of the Patkai. These two districts were separated spatially and temporally-their respective proclamations being seventy-four years apart. The historical trajectories and colonial rationale that undergird their respective creations also varied markedly. The Naga Hills District (Assam) was proclaimed primarily to deter Naga raids to protect colonial revenue-generation in the Assam foothills and plains. The Naga Hills District (Burma) emerged out of a newfound, transnational antislavery activism that followed the creation of the League of Nations in 1919 and that intertwined humanitarian concerns with imperial interests. The governments of Assam and Burma often found themselves in conflict over administrative practices, policies, and territorial boundaries within Naga-inhabited areas, thereby complicating the monologic and uniform narratives of a singularly expansionist British Raj in the region. Historical research concerning the Naga and the broader region has predominantly followed the itineraries and paper trails of the British Raj. However, advances in conceptual and methodological approaches to history are beginning to challenge and diversify these prevailing state-centric historical accounts.
This annotation presents an ex-centric critique of the universalistic and normative projections o... more This annotation presents an ex-centric critique of the universalistic and normative projections of Euro-American inflected political theology. Granted, of course, that political theology has multiple roots, routes, and divergences. My critique here does not do justice to the varying schools of thought that have importantly provincialized and vernacularized political theology perspectives, for instance in relation to secular Islam (Devji 2018), divine omnipresence in Hindu India (Banerjee 2018), or regarding the bearing of the Buddhist ineffable self on political subject making (Giri 2018). It does even do less justice to the theoretical debates and nuances within these expanded thought-fields. These qualifications made, my central and broad thesis is that the Anthropocene must make us reimagine and redesign (perhaps even reject as analytically useful) political theology, and that sustainable futures crucially hinge on our ability to expand the demos beyond the human.
In this article, I examine the relationship between state, ethnicity, territoriality and neoliber... more In this article, I examine the relationship between state, ethnicity, territoriality and neoliberal capitalism in the tribal areas of highland Northeast India, where I focus in particular on the socioecological and socio-political corollaries of its rediscovery as a resource and capitalist frontier. In so doing, I apply (capitalist) ‘desire’ and (ethnic) ‘closure’ as key analytics to capture the contentiously unfolding history of the region’s present. This article shows how new resource and capital flows lead both to the production of capitalist ‘desires’ and socioecological destruction through the privatization, acquisition and depletion, mostly by ethnic tribal elites, of communal assets now embedded in newly capitalist relations, and to the intensification of a politics of exclusive ethnoterritorial belonging and rights. The latter comes in the form of volatile social processes of ethnic ‘closure’; an increasing preoccupation, that is, on part of tribal ethnic communities with the protecting, patrolling and legislating of ethno-territorial rights. The upshot of this is a dialectic between new neoliberal connectivities and ethnic ‘closure’, one that ensues in a frame of the specifics of governance and law in highland Northeast India.
As an institution, Royal Thimphu College, akin to other university colleges in the country, is si... more As an institution, Royal Thimphu College, akin to other university colleges in the country, is situated at the vanguard of the Bhutanese society that is to come; not just through imparting young adults with specialised knowledge and skills, with patterns of socialisation, and with canons of cultural representation and style, but equally because it constitutes a decisive stage in life-long individual and collective processes of fruition. It is in this stage, when young adults hover around intellectual, emotional and professional maturity, and usually just prior to the societal roles and responsibilities of family and employment, that young adults are engaged in often highly personalised and equally highly socially conditioned quests of self-discovery and self-making. It is when embodied experiences mould their general outlooks, and when they speculate, reflect and worry about the road they are traveling and about the paths and possibilities that fork off in the college afterlife. This essay seeks to capture precisely this moment; a phase that is fleeting, life-altering, uncertain, and often stressful. It does so through the analytics of ‘experiences’, ‘aspirations’, and ‘anxieties.’
Zomia, in the sense exulted by James C. Scott (2009) as an abode of purposeful political anarchy ... more Zomia, in the sense exulted by James C. Scott (2009) as an abode of purposeful political anarchy and anti-stateism, is not an emic conceptualization, not a particular place or an incantation of a collective identity referred to or professed by particular populations of humans. As a spatial and social reality, or as a word-concept, Zomia, then appears an exercise in scholarly magical realism (evidence is ‘thin’, ‘limited’, and ‘ambiguous’, as Victor Lieberman (2010: 339) puts it more discreetly). It is a form of geographical and historical imagination that nevertheless has begun to ‘escape’ the narrow corridors of the academy and into public discourse where it now lives a life of its own. It is an original imagination no doubt – an optic that stimulates fresh scholarship – but one simultaneously cannot escape that Zomia-disciples are letting their imagination run away with them.
This essay traces the early beginnings of the Indo-Naga conflict, which erupts in the 1950s and c... more This essay traces the early beginnings of the Indo-Naga conflict, which erupts in the 1950s and continues into the present-day. It focuses on the period roughly between the Battle of Kohima in 1944, which ends Japanese expansionism in the east, and the enactment of Nagaland state in 1963 as an envisaged (but failed) political compromise to the demand by the Naga National Council (NNC) for complete Naga sovereignty. This essay uses hitherto scantily used tour and personal diaries, government reports, private correspondence, memoires, and recorded memories to interrogate the master-narrative of the Naga struggle that reconstructs a relatively straight and uncomplicated historical trajectory that sees the genuine awakening and NNC-led political mobilization of an upland community situated off the beaten track of both Indian civilization and colonial domination, and of Nagas’ collective resolve to take up arms to fight for a place on the table of nation-states. Alternatively, if the story is told from the vantage of the Indian state, the dominant narrative apportions blame to a ‘misguided’ Naga elite that seeks to undermine the territorial and national integrity of the Indian state. These prevailing views, attractive for their absence of complexity, however, ignore the anguished debates, interpersonal and intertribal differences, contingent histories and events, dissenting voices, political assassinations, and sharp divisions within the rank-and-file of the NNC, and whose inner dynamics and sentiments could as well have produced outcomes other than war.
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Books by Jelle J P Wouters
The collective endeavour of the book is expressed in what the editors characterize as the clime studies of the Himalayan multispecies worlds. As a terrestrial concept, the individual case studies concretize the abstract concept of climate change in their place- and culturally-specific correlations of weather, climate pattern, and landscape change. Supported by empirical and historical findings, the concept in each chapter showcases climate change as clime change. As place, clime is discerned as both a recipient of and a contributor to climate change over time in the Himalayan context. It affirms climate change as multispecies encounters, as part of multifaceted cultural processes, and as ecologically-specific environmental changes in the more-than-human worlds of the Himalayas.
As the case studies complement, enrich, and converse with natural scientific understandings of Himalayan climate change, this book offers students, academics, and the interested public fresh approaches to the interdisciplinary field of climate studies and policy debates on climate change and sustainable development.
Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context.
A hands-on, practical, and comprehensive guide to Northeast India, this book fills a significant gap in the literature and will be an invaluable teaching, learning and research resource for scholars and students of Northeast India Studies, South Asian and Southeast Asian societies, culture, politics, humanities, and the social sciences in general.
Articles by Jelle J P Wouters
concurrent trends, namely: 1) extensive out-migration, particularly among
the youth, either to urban centres such as Thimphu or Phuentsholing, or
to international destinations like Australia, and 2) anthropogenic climate
change that adversely affect agricultural returns, or that require innovation
in terms of crop selection and farming techniques. Migration and climate change are usually studied separately in Bhutan, with migration rarely appearing in climate reports and vice versa. The National Adaptation Plan (2023) mentions “migration” just once, focusing on wildlife, with no reference to human migration. A government report on migration mentions climate change only once, linking it to urban sustainability goals (NSB, 2018). However, fresh research examines how climate change increasingly drives migration patterns, and its effects on both origin and destination places. Migration driven by climate change is estimated to increase as the effects of climate change become more pronounced. This is particularly relevant for Bhutan, which is particularly susceptible to the adverse impacts of climate change.
humanities, this article proffers two perspectives and a suggestion for
attaining a historically and culturally situated engagement with climate
change in Bhutan. I adopt (1) a Deep Time perspective to present Bhutan’s mountains as geological makers of climate and as earth-regulators of indigenous environmental flows (of water, sediment, soil) that enable and nourish life in both higher and lower altitudes and alluvial plains. I then draw on an ethnographic narrative to posit that (2) anthropogenic
climate change, as it encounters Bhutanese cosmologies and wisdom
traditions, is not morally neutral – as the climate sciences may apprehend
it – but is experienced, interpreted and responded to by Bhutanese
communities as the (un)doings of a living, listening and agential landscape. his then leads me to call for (3) a more situated, more capacious, and more inclusive study of climate change in Bhutan that complements the globally dominant technical-secular-scientific sense of climate change