The Indo-Pacific region is an arc of societies from India and China, across Southeast Asia, to Japan. This vast region, home to over 60% of humankind, has great ethno-ecological, biological and cultural diversity, but one common trait of much of the region is the presence of high mountains. Mountain peoples have given rise to states (as in Tibet), but also to political alternatives to states (as in what J.C. Scott calls “Zomia” in SE Asia).
The centre of this region is Northeast India, along with the eastern Himalayan region. It forms a distinctive transitional zone between the Indian, Indo-Malayan and Indo-Chinese bio-geographical realms. The region is an ethnic mosaic of more than 130 major tribal communities, with diverse languages and dialects. Many tribal groups have counterparts in Tibet and Yunnan (China), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Burma and the Chittagong hill tracts (Bangladesh). In addition to tribal groups, other non-tribal groups have also come into existence because of prolong interactions between the cultures of the migrants and those of the indigenous people as recent as the last century. The region has been called a ‘living museum of man’ because of the cultural diversity and ancient Indigenous knowledge systems.
Mountains and forests provide an ecological context of the socio-economic-cultural lifestyles of these groups. We propose to gather scholars working in these areas and, for comparative purposes, with tribal, Indigenous, or non-Indigenous groups in mountainous areas across the Indo-Pacific. The proposed symposium is an attempt to explore the diversity of the Indo-Pacific from an ethno-ecological perspective. What is the influence of the mountain ecology, with its biodiversity, on human societies in the region? Indigenous tradition and contemporary changes will be analysed, both from the emic and etic perspective as well as through synchronic and diachronic approaches, to conceptualize the region in the contemporary period.
