Abstract

Food sovereignty has emerged as a critical site for indigenous peoples’ struggle across the world. To be able to feed oneself and to cultivate crops and raise animals with particular historical and cultural significance are hence projected as central to indigenous sovereignty. Yet, the twin effects of climate change and increasing corporate control of the global food chain make such efforts increasingly difficult. In the seminar, I will discuss an ongoing research project that address indigenous food sovereignty practices in the Eastern Himalayan Region. I will particularly discuss the attempt to revive cultivation of traditional food crops like millets, buckwheat and job’s tears. As part of this, I will pose the larger question about the future of upland agriculture and particular to role of shifting cultivation in the present conditions of the Anthropocene. In the project we have been experimenting with different collaborative research methods, which also will be discussed in the seminar.  

Bio 

Bengt G. Karlsson is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. He is mainly working on issues relating indigenous peoples and the society-environment interface, with particular focus on the politics of ethnicity and nature in India. Karlsson has published on topics like indigeneity, forests, conservation, mining, subaltern movements, ethnicity, development and political ecology. He is presently working on a project on food sovereignty in Eastern Himalayas. Karlsson is the author of Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People’s Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal (Routledge, 2000), Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India's Northeast (Berghahn Book, 2011), Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (Cambridge University Press, 2019, co-authored with Dolly Kikon), and the edited volumes Indigeneity in India (Kegan Paul 2006, with Tanka B. Subba), Geographies of Difference: Explorations in Northeast Indian Studies (Routledge, 2017, with M. Vandenhelsken and M. Barkataki-Ruscheweyh) and Seedways: The Circulation, Care and Control of Plants in a Warming World (Vitterhetsakademien, 2021, with Annika Rabo). Karlsson is member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.