干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

In the northern Nilgiris of South India the post-colonial state, local Adivasi communities and imaginations of modernity constitute a dynamic Field of often tense but also creative relationships. Rather than an arid dichotomy of tradition and modernity we are dealing here with a specific form of an alternative or local modernity. This paper analyses how this particular modernity is constructed through a broad spectrum of activities ranging from dominance and cultural hegemony to cohabitation down to everyday and cultural resistance. Moreover, this field is Constituted through Cultural processes of imagination, everyday practices and performances - in secular as well as in religious/shamanic contexts. Seen together these practices present the domain of public Culture as a zone of debate and as a contested terrain. In Particular this essay explores how actors use these everyday practices and political/religious performances to imagine or/and contest particular notions of modernity, statehood and sociality and how these relate to one another - in short, how complex agencies constitute local modernity in a Field of what Ortner (1995:176) has called political and cultural "authenticity".