Jana Fortier. Kings of the Forest: The Cultural Resilience of Himalayan Hunter-Gatherers. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2009. xii + 215 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8248-3322-0; $24.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8248-3356-5.
Reviewed by Bernardo Michael (Messiah College)
Published on H-Asia (April, 2010)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin)
The Cultural Resiliency of Hunter-Gatherers in the Himalayas
Jana Fortier's book seeks to understand the cultural resiliency displayed by such foraging groups as the Raute in the mid-hills of western Nepal. The Raute who roam between one thousand and nine thousand feet, despite facing enormous pressure from surrounding agrarian communities and the Nepali state, still cling to their beliefs and practices. Fortier's monograph is also a call to respect the right of indigenous groups, such as the Raute, to preserve their own lifeways given the pressure to assimilate introduced by forces of globalization and development. It adds substantially to our understanding of the Raute following the early work of Johan Reinhard in the 1970s.[1] The book is divided into nine chapters that cover various aspects of Raute life, including their identity, social relationships with outside communities, trade, religious beliefs, foraging strategies, and cultural resiliency.
The nomadic Raute live in the forests of the mid-hills of western Nepal. Speaking a language called Khamei (of Tibeto-Burman extraction), they claim to be the kings of the forest. Their origins are obscure and they practice a combination of short-term sedentary residence with a nomadic lifestyle. Compared to their hierarchical, caste-based agrarian neighbors, the Raute are more egalitarian, but at the same time the various bands lack a well-defined and stable sense of group identity so cannot be neatly subsumed under the familiar categories of Hinduism or the Nepali nation. Unlike their foraging neighbors, like the Raji and Banrajis, the Raute observe narrow foraging strategies limited mostly to langur and macaque monkeys. Fortier thinks that their decision to do so is due to competition they face from larger animals and local farmers for the food available from the forest. The food hunted is carefully distributed among members of the group without regard to social position. In addition to meat, the Raute also consume about ninety different types of wild greens, fruits, vegetables, nuts, tubers, mushrooms, and spices. They refrain from cultivating crops and raising animals. Unlike other foraging groups in these hills, the Raute have little interest in supplementing their diet with fishing or honey gathering. While the Raute do not generally accept money, they supplement the resources available by carving wooden bowls, boxes, cups, and spoons that are in great demand. Much of this production and subsequent bartering is performed by men. Raute cosmology sees the world as divided into two realms--one where the sun, moon, clouds, and stars reside and the other being the earth with its forests. The earthly realm is inhabited with supernatural deities, human ancestors, and ghosts. In this sense the Raute world is an "animistic" one.
It is the ability of the Raute to survive as hunter-gatherers into the twenty-first century that Fortier celebrates. The Raute have clung to their hunter-gatherer lifeways in the face of persistent attempts by their agrarian neighbors, development organizations, and the Nepali state to convert them into farmers. To achieve this, the Raute have developed a portfolio of verbal, rhetorical, and theatrical skills, including posturing, silence, melting into the forest, and so on, that have enabled them to preserve their ways of life. In this manner, the Raute have successfully engaged their agrarian neighbors, traders, tourists, and government officials while deflecting any pressure to be co-opted by the lifestyles of these neighbors. They also make strategic use of mit or "bond friendships" with elite villagers. Such friendships provide the Raute with access to resources, such as vegetables, tobacco, fruit, cloth, goats, and political protection from villagers who might perceive the Raute as competitors for forest resources. These strategies have enabled the Raute to preserve their way of life, resist encroachment by competing groups, and gain access to valuable resources. However, such a portfolio of verbal skills and practices might not be the monopoly of the Raute only. This style of what we may term "impression management" has always been employed as a tactic for survival by most marginalized groups in South Asia. Anthropologists and oral historians might be particularly well suited to pursue further research in this verbal art form. Such practices of impression management should form an integral part of studies on state formation, especially those that focus on the "art of not being governed."[2] Communities like the Raute, living across the Himalayan region and beyond into Southeast Asia, have used these strategies to preserve some degree of autonomy when faced with their powerful agrarian neighbors and overarching states.
Fortier also believes that groups, such as the Raute, exemplify a cultural diversity that allows us to broaden our understanding of human communities. She rightly feels that the efforts of the Raute to preserve their cultural traditions should be appreciated and every effort made to understand and respect their way of life. "The Raute, like us, are not some residual 'cavemen' culture; they are not stuck in a stone age. Rather, they represent a dynamic and contemporary people" (p. 167). This type of observation about cultural dynamism serves as a useful caveat when trying to understand not just hunter-gatherer groups but other agrarian communities as well, such as the Amish, who have tried to keep away from their more "English" neighbors.[3]
Fortier must be commended for pursuing her work under very challenging field conditions. As an outsider, she handled her relationships with the Raute with respect and care. Few anthropologists today have an opportunity, as Fortier did, to conduct an ethnography of a hunter-gatherer group. Her work also serves as a reminder about the continued value of preserving biocultural diversity. She also resists placing hunter-gatherers within any neat linear evolutionary perspective. Rather, she suggests that historically hunter-gatherer groups might have pursued diverse strategies for survival (involving their diet, cross cultural interactions, religious beliefs, and trading patterns) even as they confronted powerful forces emanating from elsewhere. Fortier's book also serves to remind us about how such hunter-gatherer groups have maintained close and historically evolving relationships with their agrarian neighbors. What emerges is a picture of various Raute groups entering into enduring and dynamic relations with their environment, local societies, and states. Fortier's work also allows us to entertain the possibility of "cultural reversion," whereby certain groups abandon their agrarian lifestyles to adopt a hunter-gatherer one, for example, the Mlabri in northern Thailand about five hundred to eight hundred years ago.[4] Fortier's ethnography is not driven by a narrow agenda of just writing about the Raute merely in terms of themselves. Rather, she is interested in revealing to planners and development experts the crucial ways in which foragers and hunter-gatherers contribute to the web of biodiversity. By inserting her voice in these ongoing conversations, Fortier hopes to educate her audience about the continuing value of hunter-gatherers in any society. Her anthropology seeks to find its feet in such practical matters.[5]
A few suggestions deserve mention. Fortier could have given the reader a better sense of the internal divisions within the group. For instance, did all members of the group agree (across generations and genders) on the nature of the engagement with their neighbors, use of money, modern technology, and language? The role of memory in the construction of Raute identity merits some exploration in chapter 3, as it is clear that their memories of their past change every couple of generations to produce a flexible body of histories.
But these are minor quibbles. Fortier's work is a valuable and rare treatment of a hunter-gatherer group. It provides a fascinating and largely untold story of foragers and hunter-gatherers who have coexisted with their caste-based agrarian neighbors for hundreds of years. The number of these forager and hunter-gatherer groups, like the Hadza (Tanzania), Ituri (central Africa), Jenu Kurumba (south India), Anishinabe (Manitoba), Inupiats (circumpolar Canada), and Sonaha (far western Nepal), is dwindling and Fortier's work gives us a rare glimpse into their ways of life. It should be useful for undergraduate, graduate, and general audiences drawn from a variety of fields, including anthropology, history, Asian studies, environmental studies, ecology, ethnic studies, and development studies.
Notes
[1]. See Johan Reinhard, "The Raute: Notes on a Nomadic Hunting and Gathering Tribe of Nepal," Kailash 2, no. 4 (1974): 233-271.
[2]. The reference here is to James C. Scott's recent work The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist View of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
[3]. The Amish, who live in places like Lancaster County in Pennsylvania refer to their neighbors as English, possibly while recalling their own German ancestry. For an introduction to the Amish, see Donald Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
[4]. A controversial case of such "cultural reversion" involving the Tasaday in the Philippines is covered in the video The Lost Tribe (1993).
[5]. On the role of anthropology in Nepal, see Pratyoush Onta, "Anthropology Still Finding Its Feet," Himal, 5, no. 5 (1992): 31-33.
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Citation:
Bernardo Michael. Review of Fortier, Jana, Kings of the Forest: The Cultural Resilience of Himalayan Hunter-Gatherers.
H-Asia, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29897
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