Abstract
Indigenous people across cultures view land and natural resources as sacred –living, thinking, and acting beings. Indigenous land, forest, water, and mountains are currently under pressure, commodified, and objectified from the dramatic expansion of large-scale extraction activities and mindless development ventures taken up by states and profit-oriented multinational corporations. Based on my fieldwork in Odisha, I focus on the sacred logic of various Indigenous justice movements to protect their land, livelihood, and spiritual identity. It is well known that the problems faced by the indigenous peoples are essentially universal. They suffer from the consequences of historic injustice, including colonization, dispossession of the lands, territories, and resources, oppression and discrimination, and lack of control over their ways of life. Colonial and modern states have primarily denied their right to development in pursuing economic growth. In India, despite the presence of several laws to protect the Adivasis and their habitats, which have been systematically violated and encroached upon by mega-national companies and multinationals to extract minerals and other natural resources on their land. In this paper, I present indigenous wisdom on land, medicine, livelihood, and spiritual identity as the logic to fight against the coercive state and profit-making corporations. Based on nearly three decades of ethnographic research and listening to residents of southeastern Odisha, I present what I have learned from the indigenous people who have shared their wisdom and life experiences with me.
Presenters
Annapurna PandeyLecturer, Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Indigenous Wisdom, Spirituality, Odisha, India
