Date of Award

8-22-2025

Date Published

September 2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Anthropology

Advisor(s)

Susan Wadley

Second Advisor

Azra Hromadzic

Keywords

Bureaucracy;Citizenship;Democracy;Development;Ho Adivasi;Subjectivity

Abstract

This dissertation explores how Ho adivasis, an indigenous tribe in eastern India, navigate neo-liberal state-led development, extractive capitalism, and liberal democracy. While existing scholarship on tribal communities in South Asia crucially highlights the structural marginalization and identity politics of these groups, it often relies on binary frameworks such as exclusion versus inclusion or resistance versus compliance. Such framings risk flattening internal heterogeneity and ascribing static, essentialized group identities. In contrast, this study foregrounds adivasi personhood, shifting practices and claims of citizenship, and the quotidian negotiations through which democratic life and bureaucratic structures are inhabited, contested, and reconfigured. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nakahasa, a Ho adivasi village in southern Jharkhand, this study traces the long durée impact of limestone mining on the community. It examines how resource extraction has reshaped landscapes, disrupted agrarian livelihoods, and provoked a locally rooted yet evolving resistance movement. Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and sustained immersion in everyday village life and political activity, the research explores how adivasi actors articulate new subjectivities and claims to citizenship—not simply by opposing the state, but by negotiating with, appropriating, and reworking the practices of neoliberal governance and development. The dissertation moves beyond political-economic analyses of extractive industries to foreground their affective dimensions—aspirations, suffering, and loss—experienced unevenly across class, gender, and age. These affects are mediated through relational ethics and enacted via strategic positionings, selectively drawing on translocal discourses of indigeneity, bureaucratic-legal idioms, and local adivasi cosmologies. These affective experiences are not merely responses to extraction but are integral to the formation of adivasi subjectivity. To theorize this, the dissertation develops a framework of relational-substantive personhood. Drawing on anthropological concepts of partible and fractal persons (Strathern 2018; Wagner 1991), it conceptualizes Ho subjectivity as constituted through dynamic social ties and enduring attachments to land, labor, and cosmological forces. Applying this framework reveals how resistance operates not merely as opposition to state power, but as a generative space for political becoming and subject formation. For instance, an emergence of protest meetings as informal pedagogical spaces for learning bureaucratic procedures and rights discourse, and birth of naya neta (new youth leaders) contesting village council elections. Through these acts, adivasi actors actively negotiate and rework postcolonial developments and democracy from below. At the same time, the study shows how stereotypes of adivasis are actively produced, reinforced, and utilized within state apparatuses to categorize and govern them as lesser citizens. The power dynamics embedded within administrative practices, the study reveals, create a reified boundary between a modern state and “primitive” adivasi society. In sum, this dissertation offers a window into the workings of the Indian state, extractive industry, and liberal democracy as they unfold in a remote village of eastern India. It contributes a new perspective on subaltern engagements with neo-liberal development and governance, one that refuses reductive binaries of resistance versus complicity or inclusion versus exclusion. Instead, it frames development as a dynamic site for shaping subjectivity and citizenship through contestation, negotiation, and reformulation. By centering ethical life, political aspiration, and everyday maneuvering of state, capital, and development, this research contributes to political anthropology and the anthropology of the state, development, citizenship, and democracy, especially in the context of subaltern and historically marginalized communities in the Global South and beyond.

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