Morung Express News
Dimapur | April 25
Dr. Dolly Kikon’s new book, ‘Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India (Culture, Place, and Nature)’ is now available on Amazon. Published by University of Washington Press earlier this month, the book’s paperback version is all of 200 pages and also available on Kindle.
According to Amazon’s description of the book, the nineteenth-century discovery of oil in the eastern Himalayan foothills, together with the establishment of tea plantations and other extractive industries, continues to have a profound impact on life in the region. In the Indian states of Assam and Nagaland, everyday militarization, violence, and the scramble for natural resources regulate the lives of Naga, Ahom, and Adivasi people, as well as migrants from elsewhere in the region, as they struggle to find peace and work.
Senior Lecturer at the Anthropology and Development Studies Program, University of Melbourne (Australia), Kikon uses in-depth ethnographic accounts to address the complexity of Northeast India where boundaries and borders are made, disputed, and maintained. She explores the social bonds established through practices of resource extraction and the tensions these relations generate, focusing on peoples’ love for the landscape and for the state, as well as for family, friends, and neighbors.
‘Living with Oil and Coal’ illuminates questions of citizenship, social justice, and environmental politics that are shared by communities worldwide.
Dr. Kikon is also the author of ‘Life and Dignity: Women’s Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Dimapur (Nagaland)’ and ‘Experiences of Naga Women in Armed Conflict: Narratives from a Militarized Society.’
In his foreword, K. Sivaramakrishnan (Series Editor), Yale University, writes that Kikon has “written an original and deeply immersive study of the borderlands of Assam and Nagaland that will take its deserved place as a significant work on the important region between Southeast Asia, China and India.”
This study, he notes, “brings fresh and exciting direction to the growing field of borderland studies, and it establishes the importance of paying attention to affect and emotion in natural resource extraction and conflicts, rural development, and the violence of insurgency and its suppression by militarized states.”
Dr. Dolly Kikon’s research for ‘Living with Oil and Coal’ started in 2006. For more than a decade, she has explored the lives lived in militarized places in Assam and Nagaland where hydrocarbon exploration and extraction take place.
This book, she hopes, “will help readers understand the extraordinary dynamics of power, violence, and aspirations that underlie human relationships in violent geographies marked as rich resource hubs.”
Kindle Edition: Rs. 2,194
Paperback from Rs. 2,366
