RT Conference Proceedings
SR 00
A1 Gajare, Rashmi
A1 Taru, /
T1 Adivasi Identity, Haunting and Reconciliation- Negotiating Cultural Memory and Displacement
YR 2018
FD 13-14th December 2017
K1 adivasi
K1 identity
K1 conflict
K1 reconciliation
K1 human rights
K1 haunting
K1 cultural memory
K1 ethnography
K1 India
K1 segregation
K1 minority
K1 ostracising
K1 untouchability
AB Palimpsest and ‘ghost’ have been an integral part of studies on cultural memory, erasure  and its ‘haunting’. Be it Jacque Derrida’s use of ‘spectral bodies’ to analyse the ‘phantomatic’ in  ideology or Foucault’s unraveling of ‘haunting’ in his interview, “Film and Popular Memory,” it is  accepted that pieces of identity and memory remain as imprints that drive and influence the individual  or the community experiencing such ‘haunting.’  The Adivasi way of life is pluralistic, where each community has its own dynamic oral history, and  allegorical understanding of their habitats. Their idea of the sacred, like the sarna, often herald to spirits  of their ancestors and derive the ‘sacred’ from the living history, their cultural identity from their life in  the forests and now, with increasing loss of habitat (Jal, Jangal, Jameen), memory.  This research explores the nuances of the Adivasi identity and the ramifications of displacement on  their collective memory by exploring a palimpsest of the Adivasi way of life as it survives and morphs,  despite an era of displacement and erasure and as they struggle for acknowledgment and survival.  While conflict ruptures familiar systems of living, cultural memory is a representative form that assists  in attempts to recreate a past and foster reconciliation of ‘identity’ in the present.  Utilizing ethnographic studies of grassroot organizations, an analysis of contemporary Adivasi literature  and individual interviews of Adivasis involved in the advocacy efforts in Bihar and Jharkhand, this  research seeks to map the ways the Adivasis and the grass-root organizations negotiate the conflictridden landscape to evolve as a society even as they seek to legitimize, preserve and celebrate critical  aspects of what is self-recognized (in their own literature) as a five thousand year-old ‘othered’ culture  of India, often de-legitimized or alienated in the face of the mainstream ideology of the time.
T2 ICOMOS 19th General Assembly and Scientific Symposium "Heritage and Democracy"
ED New Delhi, India
AV Published
LK http://openarchive.icomos.org/id/eprint/1999/