Tribal Culture Faith History And Literature Tangsas Of Arunachal Pradesh

The Book Is A Maiden Effort To Textualise Various Elements Of Religious Beliefs And Practices Of The Tribes Of Arunachal Pradesh

The book consists 27 research papers on religious culture of Arunachal Pradesh including tribal culture with emphasis on spirits and deities, sacred specialists, and sacred rituals etc. The Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism as practised by some Arunachali tribes are presented in a historical setting along with Brahminical culture in the foothills. This is the first such study of religious history of Arunachal Pradesh and their interaction with the people of Assam, Tibet and Myanmar through the ages.

Tangsa is a major tribe of Arunachal Pradesh. There are more than 17 sub-tribes of it. The Tikhaks are inhabitants of Changlang district, Arunachal Pradesh. Some of these people hace settled in Tinsukia District of Assam, adjacent to Changlang District. The Tikhak is the oldest group to arrive at the present locations, probably in AD 1300, after the appearance of the AHoms in Assam, India. They hava a rich culture and traditions. A Profile of Tikhak Tangsa Tribe reveals its forgotten cultures and traditions as well as the reasons behind the social transformation. This book also depicts an elaborate presentation of the existing lifestyle of the tribe.

This book provides comprehensive information on enlargement of methodological and empirical choices in a multidisciplinary perspective by breaking down the monopoly of possessing tribal studies in the confinement of conventional disciplinary boundaries. Focusing on anyone of the core themes of history, archaeology or anthropology, the chapters are suggestive of grand theories of tribal interaction over time and space within a frame of composite understanding of human civilization. With distinct cross-disciplinary analytical frames, the chapters maximize reader insights into the emerging trend of perspective shifts in tribal studies, thus mapping multi-dimensional growth of knowledge in the field and providing a road-map of empirical and theoretical understanding of tribal issues in contemporary academics. This book will be useful for researchers and scholars of anthropology, ethnohistory ethnoarchaeology and of allied subjects like sociology, social work, geography who are interested in tribal studies. Finally, the book can also prove useful to policy makers to better understand the historical context of tribal societies for whom new policies are being created and implemented.

This study of an oral tradition in northeast India is the first of its kind in this part of the eastern Himalayas. A comparative analysis reveals parallel stories in an area stretching from central Arunachal Pradesh into upland Southeast Asia and southwest China. The subject of the volume, the Apatanis, are a small population of Tibeto-Burman speakers who live in a narrow valley halfway between Tibet and Assam. Their origin myths, migration legends, oral histories, trickster tales and ritual chants, as well as performance contexts and genre system, reveal key cultural ideas and social practices, shifts in tribal identity and the reinvention of religion.