Erik de Maaker
Erik de Maaker has specialized on South Asia, particularly the upland communities of its eastern borderlands. He has worked on changing notions of relatedness and belonging, notably in religious contexts. Methodologically, the material and performative (ritual, celebration) dimensions of culture tend to be central to his research. This includes the redefinition and re-appreciation of ‘traditional’ cultural ideas and practices (‘heritage’), and their growing importance in terms of ethnicity, indigeneity and nationalism. More recently, his research has extended to people’s relatedness to land, and the environment, and how access and use is contested between distinct claim holders such as local communities and the state. Research in the peripheries of post-colonial states has raised his interest in the growing importance of Asia’s borders, and he is one of the founders of the Asian Borderlands Research Network (http://www.iias.nl/research/asian-borderlands-research-network). Erik de Maaker is also a Visual Anthropologist, in which capacity he has used audiovisual means to strengthen the observational aspects of qualitative research. He has produced several ethnographic films (notable amongst which is the award winning ‘Teyyam, the Annual Visit of the God Vishnumurti’), as well as multimedia DVDs.
Address: dr. Erik de Maaker, Associate Professor
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology
Faculty of Social Sciences (room 3A34)
Leiden University
P.O. Box 9555
2300 RB Leiden
The Netherlands
Address: dr. Erik de Maaker, Associate Professor
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology
Faculty of Social Sciences (room 3A34)
Leiden University
P.O. Box 9555
2300 RB Leiden
The Netherlands
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Books by Erik de Maaker
Unique in scope, this book features case studies from Bhutan, Assam, Sikkim, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sino-Indian borderlands, many of which are documented by authors from indigenous Himalayan communities. It explores three environmental characteristics of modern Himalayas: the anthropogenic, the indigenous, and the animist. Focusing on the sentient relations of human-, animal-, and spirit-worlds with the earth in different parts of the Himalayas, the authors present the complex meanings of indigeneity, commonings and sustainability in the Anthropocene. In doing so, they show the vital role that indigenous stories and perspectives play in building new regional and planetary environmental ethics for a sustainable future.
Drawing on a wide range of expert contributions from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanist disciplines, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental humanities, religion and ecology, indigenous knowledge and sustainable development more broadly.
https://www.routledge.com/Environmental-Humanities-in-the-New-Himalayas-Symbiotic-Indigeneity-Commoning/Yu-Maaker/p/book/9780367699796
Traditions, and the way these are interpreted, play a crucial role in people’s experience of who they are, what social groups they belong to, how they are connected to the place they live in, and what claims they can advance to their social and physical environment. Consequently, ideas about tradition, bodies of knowledge, not only serve to interpret the past, but have great significance for the relationships that people maintain in the present as well. The contributions to this volume explore various ways in which traditions are created and transmitted. ‘Traditions on the Move’ allows Jarich Oosten’s former PhD students to celebrate his influence on their work.
Reviews of Erik's work by Erik de Maaker
“(this book deals with) questions of rights, agency, and choices in response to modernity and (…) adds to the current debate on indigeneity”
“What stands out in the book is the centrality of the belief in the spirits, as to how it binds and defines the relationships among people and their natural surroundings."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 56, 1 (2022): 99–118
Journal articles by Erik de Maaker
L'environnement himalayen a changé, et continue de changer, en raison de la façon dont les gens l'ont interprété et l'ont utilisé. L'analyse scientifique des transformations induites, que ce soit dans la déforestation, la construction de barrages ou la fonte des glaciers, met en évidence la façon dont l'homme a façonné le monde dans l'Anthropocène. D'autre part, les études multi-espèces ont montré comment les gens dépendent invariablement des environnements spécifiques dans lesquels ils se trouvent et sont façonnés par eux. Plutôt que d'exister indépendamment de ces environnements, les gens vivent le produit de leur 'co-becoming' (Country et al 2016 : 1) ou de leur 'becoming-with' (Haraway 2008 : 12) dans une variété d'espaces et d'espèces. En ce qui concerne l'Himalaya, les deux angles d'enquête décrits ci-dessus ont jusqu'à présent rarement été combinés. Pour tenter de combler cette lacune, les contributions de ce numéro spécial examinent l'évolution du cadre d'interprétation des relations humaines et non humaines, ainsi que la manière dont elles s'expriment dans la vie quotidienne. Dans le même temps, les contributions explorent comment les interventions à grande échelle initiées par l'État, les initiatives de développement et l'expansion des entreprises commerciales ont transformé, et continuent de transformer, les espaces et les espèces de montagne, générant de nouveaux contextes sociétaux dans lesquels ils acquièrent de nouvelles significations.
Unique in scope, this book features case studies from Bhutan, Assam, Sikkim, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sino-Indian borderlands, many of which are documented by authors from indigenous Himalayan communities. It explores three environmental characteristics of modern Himalayas: the anthropogenic, the indigenous, and the animist. Focusing on the sentient relations of human-, animal-, and spirit-worlds with the earth in different parts of the Himalayas, the authors present the complex meanings of indigeneity, commonings and sustainability in the Anthropocene. In doing so, they show the vital role that indigenous stories and perspectives play in building new regional and planetary environmental ethics for a sustainable future.
Drawing on a wide range of expert contributions from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanist disciplines, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental humanities, religion and ecology, indigenous knowledge and sustainable development more broadly.
https://www.routledge.com/Environmental-Humanities-in-the-New-Himalayas-Symbiotic-Indigeneity-Commoning/Yu-Maaker/p/book/9780367699796
Traditions, and the way these are interpreted, play a crucial role in people’s experience of who they are, what social groups they belong to, how they are connected to the place they live in, and what claims they can advance to their social and physical environment. Consequently, ideas about tradition, bodies of knowledge, not only serve to interpret the past, but have great significance for the relationships that people maintain in the present as well. The contributions to this volume explore various ways in which traditions are created and transmitted. ‘Traditions on the Move’ allows Jarich Oosten’s former PhD students to celebrate his influence on their work.
“(this book deals with) questions of rights, agency, and choices in response to modernity and (…) adds to the current debate on indigeneity”
“What stands out in the book is the centrality of the belief in the spirits, as to how it binds and defines the relationships among people and their natural surroundings."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 56, 1 (2022): 99–118
L'environnement himalayen a changé, et continue de changer, en raison de la façon dont les gens l'ont interprété et l'ont utilisé. L'analyse scientifique des transformations induites, que ce soit dans la déforestation, la construction de barrages ou la fonte des glaciers, met en évidence la façon dont l'homme a façonné le monde dans l'Anthropocène. D'autre part, les études multi-espèces ont montré comment les gens dépendent invariablement des environnements spécifiques dans lesquels ils se trouvent et sont façonnés par eux. Plutôt que d'exister indépendamment de ces environnements, les gens vivent le produit de leur 'co-becoming' (Country et al 2016 : 1) ou de leur 'becoming-with' (Haraway 2008 : 12) dans une variété d'espaces et d'espèces. En ce qui concerne l'Himalaya, les deux angles d'enquête décrits ci-dessus ont jusqu'à présent rarement été combinés. Pour tenter de combler cette lacune, les contributions de ce numéro spécial examinent l'évolution du cadre d'interprétation des relations humaines et non humaines, ainsi que la manière dont elles s'expriment dans la vie quotidienne. Dans le même temps, les contributions explorent comment les interventions à grande échelle initiées par l'État, les initiatives de développement et l'expansion des entreprises commerciales ont transformé, et continuent de transformer, les espaces et les espèces de montagne, générant de nouveaux contextes sociétaux dans lesquels ils acquièrent de nouvelles significations.
Foregrounding rooted cosmopolitanism thus creates a focus which necessarily highlights how heritage is manifest in a specific location, and how the people who admire, reject, are indifferent to, or otherwise live with this heritage value and appreciate it. This connectedness between place and people makes methodological demands and explains why this volume is located at the intersection of Archaeology and Anthropology, even though most of the contributors locate themselves either in Archaeology or in Anthropology. While the affinity between these two disciplines is in a thematic sense more or less self-evident, methodological repertoires tend to differ (Gosden 1999; Garrow and Yarrow 2010). Where an archaeological perspective necessarily considers a diachronic perspective, anthropologists can often live with a much shallower appreciation of time. Anthropologists, on the other hand, are place-wise in a comparative endeavor. Even if for many anthropologists conducting research in one’s own cultural context has become the norm, research outcomes still need to be formulated for a delocalized global readership (although in practice this is typically Western and Anglophone). Adopting rooted cosmopolitanism as a conceptual framework demands both depth of time and change of place to be taken into consideration.
Judith Pine wrote: "De Maaker provides a detailed description of the mismatch between global and local discourses that communities and activists nav- igate, challenging the assumption, fundamental to global discourses, that indigenous peoples in all cases have a par- ticular relationship with the land. He notes, for example, that Garo people—portrayed as loving the land in promo- tional literature—see it instead as full of danger and dif- ficulty. Cosmopolitan Christian Garo, on the other hand, create a global sensibility within which “authentic” Garo wearing loincloths perform the role of “archetypical con- servationists, driven by the ‘sacrality’ which they locate in nature” (31). There is a temptation to dismiss as inau- thentic the efforts made by these activists to situate them- selves or their rural counterparts as indigenous. Avoid- ing this oversimplification, de Maaker instead describes the complex, historically situated relationships to land, the discourses between traditional religion and Christianity, and the shifting notions of what it means to be indigenous in a South Asian context. This sets the tone for the book." (Pine, J. (2020) American Ethnologist 47(1): 92-94.
Teyyam, The Annual Visit of the God Vishnumurti has received an 'Award for Excellence' from the American Anthropological Association (SVA) (1998).
Cultureel antropoloog Erik de Maaker woonde 21 maanden bij een familie van de Garo, een bergvolk in noordoost India, en bestudeerde daar hun doodsrituelen. Overlijdensrituelen kunnen veel zeggen over het dagelijks leven van een volk. De Maaker praatte niet alleen met de Garo, maar filmde ze ook uitgebreid. De opnames bekeek en besprak hij later samen met hen. Dat leidde tot nieuwe inzichten, zowel bij de onderzoeker als bij de Garo.