Highland Odisha: Life and Society Beyond the Coastal World

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This volume inverts the othering characteristic of most studies of Odisha by drawing attention to the highlands in the west and south. Based on fieldwork, participant observation, oral traditions, archival materials and
long-term historical and anthropological research by a range of scholars negotiating this region and its people, this volume examines the less visible and often misrecognized highlands of Odisha, thus questioning dominant coast-centric views and acknowledging a mutlitude of perspectives on Odisha beyond simplified dichotomies. The nine essays herein cover themes such as social structures and patterns of kinship and relatedness; concepts of food, music or death and their significance to wider cosmologies; interdependencies among highland communities and the posititon of migrant farmers between caste and Adivasi society; and processes of resistance and ideas around Nehruvian industrialization projects set up in the supposed ‘wilderness’.