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Article Dans Une Revue Asian Ethnology Année : 2013

Ethnic Conversions and Transethnic Descent Groups in the Assam-Meghalaya Borderlands

Philippe Ramirez

Résumé

This article reports several findings that run against the conventional picture of Northeast India as a set of sealed ethnic compartments. The adoption of individuals or groups originating from a different ethnicity is far from being a marginal phenomenon and is actually often institutionalized. Through purification rites, people get ethnically converted. The process is often linked to interethnic marriages and facilitated in the long term by the existence of equivalences among the surnames associated with different ethnic groups. Equivalences allow for repeated interethnic marriages while preserving the structural specificities of each social system involved. As people move from one community to another, they adopt new cultural features and a new surname , but on a broader scale, prescribed alliances and relations of exogamy are preserved. The possibility of ethnic conversions opens up several fundamental questions on the ethnic and cultural genesis of the region. And as they are in certain instances manipulated or contested within the political arena, ethnic conversions remain a true contemporary issue.
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Dates et versions

hal-01087198 , version 1 (25-01-2017)

Identifiants

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Philippe Ramirez. Ethnic Conversions and Transethnic Descent Groups in the Assam-Meghalaya Borderlands. Asian Ethnology, 2013, Performing Identity Politics and Culture in Northeast India and Beyond, 72 (2), pp.279-297. ⟨10.2307/23595480⟩. ⟨hal-01087198⟩
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