4 - Peoples without History?

Summary

Historical questions and historical evidence are of genuine importance for characterizing ethnicity – not, perhaps, by way of defining a common history of some set of people but rather by way of defining the context of ethnogenesis itself, the context of the virtual invention of an ethnic category.

Etic and emic ideas of Garo-ness suggest clear-cut categories, well demarcated by social boundaries, and labelled with unambiguous names. Close scrutiny of past and present administrative and ethnographic accounts however, shows that boundaries between the Garos and others have been much fuzzier and more permeable than those investigations suggest. While the Garos and other upland people were generally considered similar in their “primitiveness” as pointed out in Chapter 2, these so-called hill tribes were not regarded as a homogeneous lot. From the moment that the British began their explorations of this region, they attempted to impose order on the bewildering diversity they encountered. So many articles and books about the region's cultural variety have since been published that it has become a cliché. This chapter concentrates on these attempts to classify the heterogeneous lot of “primitives” into clear-cut races, nations, or tribes, with particular focus on the boundaries between the Garos and others as they were applied by these colonial observers. Through careful comparison I examine the dynamics and changeability of social boundaries and hope to show that, in the words of Charles Keyes, “[t]here is no logical reason why self-identification and assigned identity should always coincide since the two identifications belong to different cultural sets.”

FROM FUZZY IDENTITIES TO FIXED COMMUNITIES

With the following fragment, Playfair begins his preface (in 1909) to the first monograph ever published on the Garos. In his duty as Civil Officer of the Garo Hills district, he was in daily contact with its inhabitants. His book, which he simply entitled The Garos, was the first systematic account on the Garos and probably became the most important source for his contemporaries and many later writers. It has perhaps become the most famous of all works on Garos and is still widely used as a reference work.