Seminar Announcement
Date: Thursday, 7 November 2024
Time: 3:30 PM
Venue: Seminar Hall, CMI
Understanding tigers from the islanders' point of view: ethnographic accounts from the Sundarbans
Annu Jalais
Krea University.
07-11-24

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Abstract

This paper explores how Sundarbans islanders living in the southern reclaimed islands of the Bengal delta both think about and ‘interact with’ the man-eating tigers of the region. It argues that the islanders’ interactions with tigers articulate both social practices and understandings of the social, and that attitudes to the forest/land opposition divide people into the distinct groups. These interactions are discussed in connection with people’s relation to their environment; an environment understood both as a set of narratives – about humans and tigers sharing a cantankerous nature because of a harsh geography and of a common history of displacement – and as a practical experience – of working in the forest as crab, fish or honey collectors, especially by opposition to landowning cultivators. By engaging with the Sundarbans islanders’ narratives and daily experiences of living ‘alongside tigers’, this paper addresses the Sundarbans islanders’ social relations as well as ideas of the social not just in relation to themselves and each other, but also in relation to their position as a ‘collective’ and their place in the realm of the politics of global conservation