A history of marginality: Nature and culture in the western Himalayas.
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation traces the history of the dialectical relationship between centre and margins in a remote mountainous region of Hunza in what is now in northern Pakistan, exploring in particular the politics of representation over time and the material consequences in the region. The dissertation is an interdisciplinary effort, bringing together environmental studies, anthropology and history. It begins in the era of the Great Game---the 19th century struggle between the British and Russian empires for control of the tract of land between South and Central Asia---on the northern frontiers of British India. It ends in the contemporary period, exploring the interactions between Hunza communities in the area and global environmentalist discourse and practice, within the ambit of the modern nation state, particularly in the context of the creation, in 1975, of the Khunjerab National Park in the area. Using Derridas conception of a stable and ever present center, I argue that the center needs margins to provide stability and coherence to its own social categories: it must be placed in opposition or difference to an other, a marginal other. The function of the center in this self-other relation is to limit the possible play of the meaning, or identity, of the self, thus fixing it in relation to the other. This dialectical construction of the self and the other involves the presence of a conceptual boundary between the two. In this dissertation I have argued that the center used the nature/culture boundary to construct its own self identity in relation to Hunza. This dissertation shows that nature/culture boundary is not rigid rather there is a pattern of movement in its tension which is associated with changing politics and major intellectual paradigms at the center. When the centers were sure of their own political power and/or the people of Hunza appeared as threatening to their power the boundary between nature and culture was often strict and rigid. When the people of Hunza appeared unthreatening to the center and/or the centers were themselves unsure of their power, the nature-culture boundary was often less rigid and the center allowed this boundary to be breached and important connections to be made across them. This status of this boundary---a boundary in tension---can be considered in terms of play in the Derridian structure. Thus we notice that during the times when the boundaries were less rigid, the identities of the outsiders and the people of Hunza became fluid, sometimes overlapping, at others held in a relationship of neutral but positive difference. When the boundaries were rigid, the identities of the people of Hunza and outsiders became more rigid and fixed, that is, less playful. The dissertation shows that through history, the people of Hunza have played a role in the maintenance and relative play rigidity and permeability/flexibility) in these boundaries from their own cultural logic. The interactions between them and the centers have however had different consequences depending upon how the act of boundary making and boundary breaking was perceived by the outsiders and the magnitude of transgression. This dissertation shows that representations are contingent products of changing conceptions of two very powerful categories of mind: nature and culture. The dissertation also shows that despite the contingent character of identity formation, there is an underlying structure of interrogation between margins and center. Both margins and center contribute through their agency to the production of this structure.