The Demands of Recognition makes a major contribution to the understanding of contemporary indigenous cultural politics. Middleton has a gift for luminous ethnographic narrative and incisive theoretical formulations.
James Clifford, University of California In this remarkable ethnography, Townsend Middleton examines the recursive power of ethnographic classification by demonstrating anthropology's powerful role in the politics of postcolonial recognition ... Read morein India. At once an ethnography of 'tribal' communities in Darjeeling and of the government anthropologists studying them, this dizzying hall of mirrors will provoke and unsettle.
Akhil Gupta
University of California, Los Angeles, author of Red Tape
This book vividly stages the encounter between the ethnographic state and community politics in northeastern India. Middleton asks how and why a movement for regional sovereignty sought 'the tribal slot' to achieve recognition and redress. He finds the answer in anthropology. With lively prose and keen insight, he illuminates the unruly force of anthropological knowledge within postcolonial governance and rights.
Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology and of South Asian Studies Show Less