{"title":"Highland Asia as a field of anthropological study","authors":"J. Wouters","doi":"10.2218/thj.v1.2019.4188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2218/thj.v1.2019.4188","url":null,"abstract":"Zomia, in the sense exulted by James C. Scott (2009) as an abode of purposeful political anarchy and anti-stateism, is not an emic conceptualization, not a particular place or an incantation of a collective identity referred to or professed by particular populations of humans. As a spatial and social reality, or as a word-concept, Zomia, then appears an exercise in scholarly magical realism (evidence is ‘thin’, ‘limited’, and ‘ambiguous’, as Victor Lieberman (2010: 339) puts it more discreetly). It is a form of geographical and historical imagination that nevertheless has begun to ‘escape’ the narrow corridors of the academy and into public discourse where it now lives a life of its own. It is an original imagination no doubt – an optic that stimulates fresh scholarship – but one simultaneously cannot escape that Zomia-disciples are letting their imagination run away with them.","PeriodicalId":354303,"journal":{"name":"The Highlander: Journal of Highland Asia","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122607323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On methodology","authors":"D. Kikon","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv4s7jp2.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv4s7jp2.15","url":null,"abstract":"The anxieties to produce good research work is inherent in academia. Particularly, in the social sciences, research work that requires fieldwork and demands an encounter with the larger society that is outside one’s respective departments and the university produces various kinds of experiences and feelings. Among anthropologists, one can be lost in the field, fall in love, get frustrated, or go native. Yet, the tension between capturing what one witnesses during fieldwork and the producing a piece of work that contains a sharp theoretical analysis and an introspective narrative is often challenging. This essay is not a prescriptive note about methodology, but it is rather my attempt to reflect about doing fieldwork and the circumstances under which we carry out research work in Northeast India.","PeriodicalId":354303,"journal":{"name":"The Highlander: Journal of Highland Asia","volume":"127 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115776886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}