Search

This article uses ethnographic and historical data on certain pastoral and agro-pastoral communities in Jammu and Kashmir to illustrate the simultaneous or consecutive use of a variety of cultural features in the construction, maintenance and manipulation of identity. it describes and analyses the context specific uses of religion, language and so on to include as much as to exclude in various economic and political settings. The data exemplify the floating nature of identity, which enables adaptation, assimilation and accommodation to a range of historical contexts within broader regional systems of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on social groupings among the Bakkarwal of the western Himalayas. In this article, the author explores the problems of comprehension and translation implicit in the analysis of concepts crucial to the understanding of one universal and major aspect of culture, namely, the organization of the community and the domestic group. Family, household, community and group are terms, which may reasonably gloss native terms; but they are also organizing concepts with different, complex denotations and connotations in different cultural contexts. When there is change within these contexts, these concepts also undergo a certain modification. But change in social organization does not always imply lexical change. The semantic choices on which these changes are based often reflect broader processes of socio-economic transformation. The paradigmatic framework selected here is that of the pastoral Bakkarwal of Jammu and Kashmir. Some of the terms they use could, at first glance, be translated as family, household, camp or community, but such straight translations would ultimately hinder comprehension rather than facilitate it.