School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications

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Start date: 2010 × Author: Kikon, Dolly × Type: Journal Article ×

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    Guerrilla Gardens: Memories and Hope in a Lemon Orchard
    Deka, D ; Kikon, D (The India Forum, 2023-07-20)
    A surrendered ULFA insurgent's transition to lemon farming in Assam is the story of continued dreams of sovereignty and freedom.
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    Following Zudima in Dima Hasao
    Kikon, D (The Locovore, 2023-05-23)
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    Strawberry Farms: Adopting New Crops in Northeast India
    Kikon, D ; Deka, D (RAIOT, 2022-06-01)
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    Extractive Stories and Theories in Northeast India
    Kikon, D (Seminar, New Delhi, 2022-03-01)
    NORTHEAST India is a region rich in resources. Experts arrive here to extract information, data, and mine for minerals from nature. Yet the experiences and lives of people on the ground are often removed from the analysis. Just like in the past, present and future careers and experts emerge by mining data from the region. However, researchers fail to recognize the communities and their relations with the land as acceptable forms of knowledge. Stories that are integral for indigenous lives are regarded as empirical fodder. This is all there is to it. For reviewers, existing scholarship on the region written by tribal scholars either lacks analysis or is devoid of concepts for serious academic readers. They are accused of neither offering central arguments nor theoretical assertions, in addition to failing to engage the audience. Their efforts are, at best, admirable. What good is any scholarship that merely offers a series of observations about lived experiences, which are inconclusive? At best, exhausted reviewers dismiss tribal scholarship as mere stories. Tribal scholars are accused of stringing along stories and descriptions because they lack the analytical sharpness to draw from existing literature. Their scholarship promises but fails to deliver anything that can be considered as analyses. These views are distilled and transcribed from my experiences as a tribal ethnographer working in Northeast India for more than two decades. The world of academic scholarship and experts seldom finds it necessary to introspect how research and the production of knowledge and intellectual authority constitute a fortified realm of reason founded on hierarchies. Ethnographers take a lot for granted. One aspect involves the process of listening to stories. Writing down or recording stories includes transcribing, coding, and interpretating the connections. While concepts of entanglement and assemblage have become attractive to analyse resource frontiers and extractive regimes in the last decade, these are terms one encounters in academic journals. During fieldwork, I doubt if many of us would teach community members who narrate stories about living in extractive zones that their lives are an ‘assemblage’ or ‘entangled’. Imagine doing that! We formalize and categorize their lives into concepts, and then further argue to elaborate the mastery of our training and skills to showcase academic expertise and authority.
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    Bamboo Shoot in Our Blood Fermenting Flavors and Identities in Northeast India
    Kikon, D (UNIV CHICAGO PRESS, 2021-10)
    This essay draws from my ethnographic fieldwork in Northeast India and examines how identities are mediated through fermented food like bamboo shoot. These shoots come in different textures and forms: wet chunky pieces, sun-dried and stringy threads, smoked and curly strands. Our relationship with fermented food, as this essay highlights, determine how we organize, move, and order our lives, contributing to the creation of differences and alliances. At a time when we witness a global movement on fermenting cultures and the microbial world, this essay locates small-scale nonindustrial fermentation practices among communities across Northeast India. Exploring the significant role of food in shaping taste, practices, and politics on the ground, I show how fermenting cultures shape citizenship practices and identities. By highlighting narratives and representations of fermented food, this essay brings the extraordinarily varied and dense worlds of fermenting cultures and highlights the associative relationship between fermented food and communities.
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    Dirty food: racism and casteism in India
    Kikon, D (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-01-25)
    This article traces how food cultures in India reiterate social hierarches and caste logics of cleanliness and purity. Religious, intellectual and aesthetics battles about food preferences underline how the upper caste sensibilities justify and regulate everyday consumption and dietary practices. An integral part of Brahminical power is based on regulating and upholding dietary taboos grounded on caste ideology. Drawing from my ethnographic research on racism, migration, impunity in India over the last two decades, I examine key debates on racism and casteism, and illustrate how the rise of food-based discrimination against migrants from Northeast India is founded on an upper caste practice and logic of contamination, filth, and hygiene. I offer the concept of ganda (dirty) food to highlight how casteism and racism are informed by an upper caste reasoning of superiority, contamination, and privilege in India.
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    Hello Chinky
    Kikon, D (Society for Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 2021-03-16)
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    SEASONS OF LIFE AND SEASONS OF LAW: LAW, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND EATING BAMBOOSHOOT AND DOGMEAT
    Kikon, D (Jindal Global University, 2020)
    Dolly Kikon in conversation with the Jindal Law and Humanities Review Editorial Team on her recent documentary Seasons of Life.
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    The rehabilitation zone: Living with lemons and elephants in Assam
    Kikon, D ; Barbora, S (SAGE Publications, 2020)
    Lemon farming promoted as rehabilitation programs in western Assam has generated income for villages that were deeply affected by ethnic conflict in the 1990s. Rehabilitation is tied to an economic logic linked with the market and a profit-driven measure of development. In the absence of an official reconciliation process on the ground, these economic initiatives have become an ambitious and attractive model for the Indian state to rebuild societies that have witnessed violent ethnic conflicts in Northeast India. Drawing from fieldwork carried out between 2016 and 2019 around Manas National Park, an area within the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts in western Assam, this article examines the experiences and impacts of lemon farming and focuses on practices of rehabilitation on the ground. The process of restoration includes communities living in the villages and the animals inside the park simultaneously. We show how communities are seeking to create connections with the land and their surroundings to overcome trauma and rebuild their lives. Specifically, we focus on lemon farming and the experiences of human–elephants relationships in Manas to highlight how these accounts produce an integrative account of rehabilitation in post-conflict societies. In the backdrop of militarization and structural violence, rehabilitating communities and animals is not a straightforward story. It entails proposing new theoretical frameworks to understand how reconstructing lives and the land is also about transforming relationships between humans and animals under circumstances that are often challenging. Ongoing lemon farming practices and living with elephants in Assam requires envisioning ways of belonging and living on the land and at the same time recognizing the boundaries.