Abstract
This research is about how a collective socio-political identity, the ‘Pahari’ (the hill people), is constructed by the ethnoculturally diversifi ed groups of indigenous people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh. While conducting my PhD dissertation fi eldwork in the CHT, I experienced that most of the non-Bengali ethnicities use a common term ‘Pahari’ in their everyday conversations. This term derives from the Bengali word ‘pahar’, which means “hill”; and the term ‘Pahari’ is the term used by ‘the inhabitants of hills’ or ‘the hill people’ to introduce them to visitors, tourists, or in their everyday conversations. Of course, they have their own distinctive and individual ethnic identity marked by language, religion, kinship, and marriage system (e.g., Chakma, Marma, Tanchang ya). Thus, they have two different identities: the ethnic identity and the common socio-political identity. The infl uence of hills, land, forest, Kaptai Lake, and above all, the ecological system of this region on the economy and the lives of the people who live here is immense. In this research paper, I will refl ect on how a particular place, a different geographical setting, is used to bring group members of diverse ethnicities together in order to construct a common socio-political identity. Although the ‘place’ is central to the construction of this Pahari identity, social, economic, and political relations with the Bengalis appear as determining factors in adopting such collective identity by the culturally differentiating ethnicities in the CHT. Finally, I will describe how and why the Pahari identity is contested and contradictory in broader socio-political context in Bangladesh.
Highlights
This research is about how a collective socio-political identity, the ‘Pahari’, is constructed by the ethnoculturally diversified groups of indigenous people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh
They emphasize four key criteria, cultural diversity are prevalent throughout namely the ‘place’ and ‘time’, the ‘nature and this region, primarily due to the diversity of sources of their livelihoods’; and the ‘tradiindigenous peoples
There are different discours- differs from the Bengalis of the plain. These es, confusions, and debates about the actual Pahari people argue that they are the original identity of these ethnic groups in CHT
Summary
Ferences between the indigenous and Bengali population are marked by different ethnic. I used stan- ma, Tripura, Tanchangya, and Lushai people dard anthropological data collection tech- lived in Rangamati long before the Bengali niques, including participant observation, people migrated to this region. It can be asunstructured interviews with key informants, sumed from different historical sources and and semi-structured focus group interviews narratives of the local indigenous people that following purposive and snowball sampling. A digital voice recorder was used to Sino-Tibetan It appears that both the major record interviews and informed consent was group of people might have migrated from taken with each informant.
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