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Money, Value, and Indigenous Citizenship: Notes from the Indian development state
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2019
Abstract
Based on fieldwork conducted in Kandhamal, Odisha in 2007–08, this article demonstrates how scripts about money, value, and indigeneity are used as exclusionary discourses by development state officials and caste Hindus to portray Indian tribals as failed citizens of the Indian development state. These discourses are used not only as a means of disciplining tribals as indigenous citizens, but also to elide other contradictions within the development state such as corruption, thereby sustaining ‘modern development’ as a project of perpetual deferral. However, this article also shows how Kandha tribals, in turn, appropriate these scripts to display their understanding of the shifting contours of indigenous citizenship and its mandates for entitlements from the development state and indigenous political agency. In so doing, this article demonstrates how historical discourses of money and indigeneity inform contemporary indigenous claims to citizenship. By attending to these discourses, it argues for indigeneity as a site to observe the folding-back of state power onto itself, as indigenous citizenship reanimates historical constructions of the adivasi as indigene but subverts these constructions by using a language of indigenous entitlement.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019
Footnotes
I thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and the Committee on South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago for their support during the fieldwork and write-up stages of this research. I gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments from two anonymous reviewers for Modern Asian Studies, Fernando Armstrong-Fumero, Nusrat Chowdhury, Amy Cooper, Suchismita Das, and Christine Nutter El Ouardani. I benefitted from the opportunity to serve as a respondent to Jessica Cattelino's work on money and indigeneity at Amherst College, and thank her for engaging with this piece. Thanks also to Johan Matthew, who encouraged me to present an early draft at the Five College Inter Asia Faculty Seminar, and Norbert Peabody for his warm support.
References
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