OTHERS
THE HO: LIVING IN A WORLD OF PLENTY: OF SOCIAL COHESION AND RITUAL FRIENDSHIP ON THE CHOTA NAGPUR PLATEAU
The book is set in the anthropologically much-neglected multi-ethnic interior of Highland Middle India. It is the result of fieldwork done over a period of 15 years among the Ho, an indigenous community of approximately one million people, who have shared cultural norms and the space of the hilly region of the Chota Nagpur Plateau with other aboriginal (adivasi) and artisan communities for ages.
The work explores the structured tapestry of the Ho people’s social relations and interrelatedness within their culture-specific socio-cosmic universe, ensuring their social reproduction in the present and affording them the means for and awareness of living in a world of plenty. This world of abundance – with the Ho as its conceptual centre – includes the Ho’s dead, their ancestors, their complex spirit world and supreme
deity, and their tribal and nontribal fellow humans. It manifests itself
in manifold facets of Ho people’s lives: socially, ritually, economicÂally, and linguistically.
The author’s representation of the Ho’s universe in the book is strongly informed by the ritual friendship relationship saki that was offered to the anthropologist towards the beginning of her fieldwork and has accompanied her ever since. It became a resourceful focal point, contributing to an immersive understanding of the Ho’s worldview. About the Author Eva Reichel was a senior lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology
at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is associate researcher at the Fro-benius Institute Frankfurt, Germany and associate fellow at the University of Groningen/The Netherlands. Her book Notions of Life in Death and Dying: The Dead in Tribal Middle India was published in 2009 by Manohar, New Delhi.
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