2019 年度MINDAS「移民・移動」班第1回研究会

‘Sedentarization’ and Multiple Living Base System: A Case Study of a Nomad Community in Northwestern India

Ayumi Nakano

This presentation explores forms and patterns of the settlement of nomadic peoples after their ‘sedentarization’. Jogis, who are specifically described in this presentation, are well known as a typical nomad community in Rajashtan, India. Most of them have come to settle down for these last couple of decades because of indirect influences of modernization policies such as land reform, the Bombay Prohibition Act of Begging, and the Wildlife Protection Act. Although they would traditionally move from village to village to beg for water and food, today they generally remain around specific villages and earn money as do village people by engaging in stone cutting, housing construction, or harvesting crops as laborers. Despite the remarkable change of their lifestyle, examination of the relation between their livelihood and their living bases demonstrates that camping out is useful for Jogis and that shifting the living base according to labor or other reasons is not rare among them. To obtain official addresses, which enable them to live with little trouble from village residents, they are also eager to construct huts or houses anywhere they might have an opportunity. The author concludes that the Jogis’ attempts to create and keep multiple living places function as a ‘self-safety-net’ for Jogis, who are often unable to get sufficient benefit from public assistance.

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Road Construction in the Solu region of Solukhumbu, Nepal: Conflict between transport infrastructure and trekking tourism

Fukachi Furukawa

Solukhumbu district, located at the southern foothills of the Mt. Everest, is famous for its trekking tourism. Every year, more than 30,000 foreign tourists visit this area. Many Sherpa people, all local residents, participate in the tourism industry as trekking guides, porters, and lodge owners. No transportation facility aside from mountain trails existed there until recently, although road construction is progressing rapidly in the Solu region of southern Solukhumbu.

This presentation reports the current situation of road construction and its effects on the Solu region from the following three perspectives: 1. local notions of roads and road construction; 2. economic activities appearing and disappearing along with the roadways; and 3. the practice and meaning of driving in mountainous terrain.

The related ethnographic resources revealed that people fundamentally regard the roadway as “development”. It has brought new job opportunities for construction workers and jeep drivers. Local people report that driving on mountain roads and walking on mountain trails are somewhat similar activities. They are also anxious about changes of tourist flows after road construction completion.

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Pastoralist mobility and resettlement in Bhutan highlands in light of northern border issues

Mari Miyamoto

This article sheds light on how visual images have been contextualized in people’s living sphere by analyzing the “the Liberation War wall paintings.” Visual images bound up with the Liberation Movement and the War in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) from the late 1940s to the present have circulated through different media and have transcended temporal boundaries. Wall paintings created each year for Victory Day, the anniversary of independence, by youths in a certain area of old Dhaka have an unbroken history of more than 40 years since independence. They have interpreted the images of political posters and banners painted by artists for the Liberation Movement in the 1950–60s and documentary photographs of the War in 1971. Visual images have been the subjects of public monuments, illustrated textbooks, and street paintings by artists since independence. Because the vernacular images on walls fade away over time, the painters must remember scenes of the Liberation War each year and paint them repeatedly. The 48th layers of paintings on the walls of narrow streets will appear this year: 2019. By elucidating these processes, artists, and images, this article presents the assertion that the wall paintings here are not merely viewed as “painted objects,” but are valued for the dynamic physical movement: “paint-ing.”

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