Description
Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim frontier peasants, savage mountaineers, and Christian ethnic minorities, suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of these people to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India's construction of one of the world's longest and most highly militarized border fences.
Jungle Passports recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borders. Sur shows how the division of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. Paying close attention to the forces that shape the life-worlds of deportees, refugees, farmers, smugglers, migrants, bureaucrats, lawyers, clergy, and border troops, she reveals how reciprocity and kinship and the enforcement of state violence, illegality, and border infrastructures shape the margins of life and death. Combining years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, her thoughtful and evocative book is a poignant testament to the force of life in our era of closed borders, insularity, and illegal migration.
Author: Malini Sur
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 08/06/2021
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.71lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9780812224788
ISBN10: 0812224787
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | Asian Studies
About the Author
Malini Sur is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.