Ethical Kinships: Religious Assemblages and Relatedness in the Indo-China Borderlands
Open AccessThis dissertation is an ethnography of Mising tribal efforts to reform their religiosity by turning to the emergent religious discourse of Donyipolo. Combining ethnographic and archival work, this dissertation makes two important lines of analysis. First, it examines the role of the reform in shaping Mising relations with ancestral spirits, deities, and their material world, and introduces the term “ethical kinships” in order to account for the concerted effort the Mising make to situate themselves within a more-than-human genealogy of ancestors and coeval beings. I argue that ethical kinship is an intimate, affective and reciprocally attentive bond that is mutually transformative for the entities that become with each other (Haraway 2004). Weaving literatures on kinship in STS and environmental anthropology with scholarly texts in anthropology of religion, I expand on anthropological understandings of kinship, while also making a second argument about the formation of tribal religiosity. I argue that kinship becomes an entry point to study tribal religiosity as an assemblage that is continuously stabilized and destabilized by flows of power that correspond to Mising movement within the Indo-China borderlands as well as in emerging transnational networks. Following the relationship between the movement of Mising revivalists and the formation of ethical kinship, I argue that tribal religiosity, contrary to classical anthropological assumptions, is a multi-scalar formation that develops in relation to the discourse of modernity as well as other co-eval religious discourses.
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Visibility | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Krishnan_gwu_0075A_15915.pdf | 2022-10-04 | Open Access |
|