Social and cultural Anthropolgy

The article demonstrates how relationships between the respondents and the researcher were developed while conducting an ethnographic research in a sub-district in the northern part of Bangladesh, where people were protesting the establishment of an open cut coal mining in their vicinity. During the field work it was experienced that the position of the researcher which was not fixed but multiple and shifting had greatly contributed in the relationship building. The field experience played an important role not only to gain ethnographic materials but also to understand motivations and perceptions of human security of the protesters of the social movement. However, fear of mass displacement among locals, an important motivation of the protesters to join the social movement, had also thrown the researcher in the dilemma of balancing engagement and distance with the research community. The field experience reinforces that each anthropologist should be viewed in terms of shifting identifications amid a field of interpenetrating communities and power relations (Narayan 1997:23). The experience also converses with the engagement of anthropologists Svensson, 2006) in public debate and advocacy.

Democracy has generally been understood the best remedy to prevent societal violence, as it gives different groups a channel to voice their interests and grievances. However, in this article, that focuses on the Chittagong Hills, which for many decades has formed one of the most violent spaces in Bangladesh, we argue that, in reality, democracy and violence can be two sides of the same coin. This is not to say that in Bangladesh, where full liberal democracy is not in place, ordinary citizens have no values and idea(l)s of democracy and citizenship. On the contrary, in order to make sense of the intricate connection between democratic idea(l)s, and violent imaginations and practices, we focus in particular on the process of what we call the vernacularisation of democratic politics. We connect this process to the appropriation of citizenship and nationalism, by ordinary but radically differently-positioned people, in their daily realities. We demonstrate that widely shared imaginatio...

This chapter focuses on the Bangladesh borderland with Northeast India and Myanmar (Burma). Historical and ethnographic interest in this part of Asia has remained strikingly limited, and the region would, to date, largely qualify as a 'geography of ignorance'. In his seminal article entitled 'Geographies of Knowing', Willem Van Schendel showed how academic regionalisation has produced specific 'geographies of knowing' and 'geographies of ignorance' (Van Schendel 2002). 1 He argued that '(t)he very structure of area studies leads to the peripheralisation of certain regions and certain types of knowledge', and he proposed an alternative 'physical space', which he named Zomia, to counterbalance the hitherto peripheralisation of large parts of upland Asia (Van Schendel 2002: 653). For several reasons to be explored in more detail hereinafter, we will argue that the Bangladesh borderland with Northeast India and Myanmar makes an interesting and necessary addition to the idea of 'Asian Highlands', the 'Southeast Asian Massif ', 'Zomia', or other qualifications for the Asian uplands. Mounting interest in Asian borderlands since the late 1990s and the foundation of the Asian Borderlands Research Network in 2008 have indeed encouraged scholars to overcome statecentred analyses and territorial boundaries, study crossborder connectivity and disconnections, and be inspired by distinct bodies of literature, theory, and concepts developed in/for different regional contexts. In 2010, Jean Michaud drew a map suggesting the contours of Zomia (+), imagining it as broadly stretching between the uplands of Pakistan and Afghanistan to the west and the Central Highlands of Vietnam in the east (Michaud 2010: 188). As with the other mappings of Asian Highlands in his chapter, the contours of his Zomia idea nearly meticulously follow the official border demarcations between Northeast India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. Bangladesh itself remains largely excluded, though, except for the southeastern hills known as the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). This choice makes sense, as large sections of the actual border between Bangladesh and its neighbours also mark the transition from lowland to hills. The border, however, does not meticulously follow these natural patterns. Besides the CHT, there are several hilly patches within the borders of Bangladesh. Moreover, people cannot be stopped by borders-whether these are political, ecological, or otherwise-and simply be categorised as highlanders or lowlanders.