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" Uncertain Self (Determination): National Movements at the Intersection of India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh "
Miliate, Brandon Joseph
Ganguly, Sumit
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1051393
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| Doc. No
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TL50510
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| Main Entry
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Miliate, Brandon Joseph
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| Title & Author
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Uncertain Self (Determination): National Movements at the Intersection of India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh\ Miliate, Brandon JosephGanguly, Sumit
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| College
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Indiana University
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| Date
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2019
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| Note
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242 p.
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| Abstract
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My dissertation focuses on demands for self-determination made by Kuki-Chin-Mizo peoples, living at the intersection of India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. With data collected over 7 months of fieldwork in Northeast India and Myanmar, my research seeks to understand how demands for self-determination are conceptualized by the peoples, for whom they are supposedly being made. I seek to understand the webs of meaning that underlie these political demands and what they can tell us about ethno-national identities in the borderlands of South and Southeast Asia. By starting with identity and the personal importance of self-determination to indigenous populations, I emphasize how these demands come into being and how they reveal the nuances of contemporary identity formation in this understudied part of the world. I argue that demands for self-determination do not necessarily proceed the creation of solidified, or broadly agreed upon ethnic or national identities. Rather, it is the process of making, framing, and justifying these demands that actually drives the process of debate and contestation over who is or is not included in the various possible ethnic groupings of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo borderlands. The need to frame these debates around the institutional expectations and discourses of the state forces communities to speak in terms of common languages, religion, ethnic origins, indigeneity, and racial categories, even when these terms are largely inappropriate to the reality on the ground. Institutional framing operates alongside considerations of subgroup survival that are driven as much by relative power considerations as by deeply affective concerns. Anxieties regarding the future of a given community vis-a-vis neighboring communities form the foundations of movements for self-determination and only after dealing with these affective states can we adequately access the relative power calculations that may come afterwards.
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| Descriptor
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Political science
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Ganguly, Sumit
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Indiana University
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