Experiencing Anthropology in the Nicobar Archipelago
This book explores the discipline of social-cultural anthropology through an extensive study of the Nicobarese people in one of the remotest human settlements of the Indian Ocean. It examines the social, cultural, economic, political, and magico-religious beliefs of the Nicobarese and traces their ritualistic upbringing from conception till after death. The book also discusses the Nature-Man-Spirit Complex observed in the life of the Nicobarese.
The author further utilizes this study to examine the complex role of anthropologists in maintaining objectivity and authenticity in ethnographic accounts and discusses several critical epistemological issues concerning social-cultural anthropology as a field of study today.
Based upon extensive field research by the author conducted over four decades, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology and social-cultural anthropology, human geography, social sciences, minority studies, as well as South Asian studies.
Vijoy S Sahay is Professor (Emeritus), and Former Head, Department of Anthropology, University of Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Experiencing Anthropology in the Nicobar Archipelago
Vijoy S Sahay
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2021 Vijoy S Sahay
The right of Vijoy S Sahay to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sahay, Vijoy S., author.
Title: Experiencing anthropology in the Nicobar Archipelago / Vijoy S Sahay.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020014122 (print) | LCCN 2020014123 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367857998 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003027911 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Sahay, Vijoy S.TravelIndiaAndaman and Nicobar Islands. | Nicobarese (Indic people) | Nicobarese (Indic people)Social life and customs. | Nicobarese (Indic people)Religion. | AnthropologistsIndiaBiography. | EthnologyIndiaAndaman and Nicobar Islands. | Andaman and Nicobar Islands (India)Social life and customs. | Andaman and Nicobar Islands (India)Description and travel.
Classification: LCC DS486.5.A5 S27 2020 (print) | LCC DS486.5.A5 (ebook) | DDC 954/.88dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014122
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014123
ISBN: 978-0-367-85799-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-02791-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Dedicated to
Captain Beals, who, one night at 2:00 a.m.,
dropped me on the Island of Chowra
by his cargo vessel
Katherina
(see )
Contents
by Vinay Kumar Srivastava
Guide
Not many people have a lifelong commitment to the ethnographic landscapes they chose for their doctoral research. Not many people themselves carry out a restudy of the people they studied long ago. Longitudinal studies are rather rare in social anthropology. The usual, ideal pattern followed in anthropological investigations is that the fieldworker settles in situ in a community of people for an uninterrupted, lengthy period of time, with the sole objective of making every possible effort to observe and understand the actual, lived-in, local social and cultural life as conducted on a daily basis. This textbookish style of gathering information about the other, the subject of study, the premises of which were systematized in the Trobriand study (by Malinowski: 1922), has been repeated day in day out in almost every anthropological study, irrespective of the location of the site of field study. Returning from the field area after collecting enough information, anthropologists committed themselves to the desk work, writing up an analytical, purportedly convincing account of the communitys life for publication. Since a long fieldwork yielded a rich harvest of data, for years the anthropologist continued to write on the same material. What came to the defense of the pieces of writing was the concept of the ethnographic present, meaning that it is an account of the society when fieldwork was actually conducted, when the present was observed and grasped.
If one approach was to peer into the same material again and again, look at it from different vantage points, without ever returning to the same location for another round of fieldwork to have an estimate of the change that had occurred, the other was to move from one province of study to the other, pursuing field studies in different physical areas and publishing short papers on them. Academic flirtations may introduce one to different fields of study and locations of fieldwork but may not be academically fulfilling.
Professor Vijoy S Sahay is, however, an exception. His academic fidelity to the study of the Nicobar Islands goes hand in hand with a restudy of the people he had started studying fifty years ago, for which his indebtedness to his teacher, Professor L.P. Vidyarthi is paramount. As a masters student, he accompanied Professor Vidyarthi on a pilot study of the Bay Islanders, and again, on his advice, he studied the Nicobarese culture. A piece of intensive fieldwork among the Chowra islanders, examining particularly the analytical value of Vidyarthis method in the study of the Maler of Rajmahal Hills, resulted in Professor Sahays doctoral thesis. Since then, Professor Sahay has kept himself well abreast of the developments in Andaman and Nicobar Islands. With great passion, he has lectured on his Nicobar study, and with equal dedication, he has brought together in this book his learning of anthropology through his field research.
Besides illuminating the readers on the lives of the Nicobarese, especially the dwellers of Chowra and Teressa, Professor Sahays principal interest is in taking up the questions of theoretical nature and the probable answers to these from his ethnography. Asserting the veracity of the idea that good anthropology is an interwoven matrix of facts and theory, Professor Sahay critically looks at the panorama of anthropological theories and their respective abilities to account for the reality, providing better explanations. He is correct in arguing that what is needed is a synthesis of multiple theories, for each theory has its own limitations, and in case it is followed, the empirical reality may be partially understood, or it is likely that it may be wrongly explained. An anthropologist is thus expected to stay fully informed about the developments in theories and methods. Without them, anthropology is nothing more than common sense or general studies.
