This is a well-researched and carefully detailed work on an endangered indigenous foraging Raute community living in the monsoon rainforests of western Nepal. This work concentrates on a band of some one hundred and forty hunter-gatherers, who even these days subsist on langur and macaque monkeys (whom they call “little brothers”), edible plants, wild yams, and the rice traded from the local farmers and lead their nomadic existence in makeshift camps. It is written from the perspective of the Rautes themselves, and it primarily deals with these people's strategies for “cultural resiliency” in the face of constant pressures from the Nepali state for assimilation, primarily through the abandonment of forest life and adoption of education and farming. The book also raises the current problems of deforestation, population encroachment, language domination, and political hegemony of the dominant Nepalese societies on the Rautes (“kings of the forest”) and emphasizes the need for...
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Book Review|
May 01 2011
Kings of the Forest: The Cultural Resilience of Himalayan Hunter-Gatherers
Kings of the Forest: The Cultural Resilience of Himalayan Hunter-Gatherers
. By Jana Fortier. Honolulu
: University of Hawai'i Press
, 2009
. xii, 215 pp. $24.00 (paper).
Nawaraj Chaulagain
Nawaraj Chaulagain
Harvard University
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Journal of Asian Studies (2011) 70 (2): 613–614.
Citation
Nawaraj Chaulagain; Kings of the Forest: The Cultural Resilience of Himalayan Hunter-Gatherers. Journal of Asian Studies 1 May 2011; 70 (2): 613–614. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911811000696
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