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Knowing Dil Das : Stories of a Himalayan Hunter / Joseph S. Alter.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Contemporary EthnographyPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2011]Copyright date: ©2000Description: 1 online resource (216 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812217124
  • 9780812204759
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 305.8/00954
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Part I. Bal Kand / The Book of Childhood -- Chapter 1. Dil Das-Enslaved Heart -- Chapter 2. Woodstock School: Protestants, Peasants, and Ethics -- Chapter 3. A Tiger's Tale -- Part II. Aranya Kand / The Forest Book -- Chapter 4. Coapman's Fall -- Chapter 5. Hearts of Darkness -- Chapter 6. Land Masters: Purebred History -- Part III. Shram Kand / The Book of Labor -- Chapter 7. Dairying: An Untold Story -- Chapter 8. Slippage: Out of Work, Through Hunting -- Chapter 9. The Terms of Friendship -- Part IV. Uttarkhand / Himalaya -- Chapter 10. The Heart of the Matter -- Chapter 11. A Hybrid History of Encounter -- Glossary -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index
Summary: Dil Das was a poor farmer-an untouchable-living near Mussoorie, a colonial hill station in the Himalayas. As a boy he became acquainted with a number of American missionary children attending a boarding school in town and, over the years, developed close friendships with them and, eventually, with their sons. The basis for these friendships was a common passion for hunting. This passion and the friendships it made possible came to dominate Dil Das's life.When Joseph S. Alter, one of the boys who had hunted with Dil Das, became an adult and a scholar, he set out to write the life history of Dil Das as a way of exploring Garhwali peasant culture. But Alter found his friend uninterested in talking about traditional ethnographic subjects, such as community life, family, or work. Instead, Dil Das spoke almost exclusively about hunting with his American friends-telling endless tales about friendship and hunting that seemed to have nothing to do with peasant culture.When Dil Das died in 1986, Alter put the project away. Years later, he began rereading Dil Das's stories, this time from a completely new perspective. Instead of looking for information about peasant culture, he was able to see that Dil Das was talking against culture. From this viewpoint Dil Das's narrative made sense for precisely those reasons that had earlier seemed to render it useless-his apparent indifference toward details of everyday life, his obsession with hunting, and, above all, his celebration of friendship.To a degree in fact, but most significantly in Dil Das's memory, hunting served to merge his and the missionary boys' identities and, thereby, to supersede and render irrelevant all differences of class, caste, and nationality. For Dil Das the intimate experience of hunting together radically decentered the prevailing structure of power and enabled him to redefine himself outside the framework of normal social classification.Thus, Knowing Dil Das is not about peasant culture but about the limits of culture and history. And it is about the moral ambiguity of writing and living in a field of power where, despite intimacy, self and other are unequal.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780812204759

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Part I. Bal Kand / The Book of Childhood -- Chapter 1. Dil Das-Enslaved Heart -- Chapter 2. Woodstock School: Protestants, Peasants, and Ethics -- Chapter 3. A Tiger's Tale -- Part II. Aranya Kand / The Forest Book -- Chapter 4. Coapman's Fall -- Chapter 5. Hearts of Darkness -- Chapter 6. Land Masters: Purebred History -- Part III. Shram Kand / The Book of Labor -- Chapter 7. Dairying: An Untold Story -- Chapter 8. Slippage: Out of Work, Through Hunting -- Chapter 9. The Terms of Friendship -- Part IV. Uttarkhand / Himalaya -- Chapter 10. The Heart of the Matter -- Chapter 11. A Hybrid History of Encounter -- Glossary -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Dil Das was a poor farmer-an untouchable-living near Mussoorie, a colonial hill station in the Himalayas. As a boy he became acquainted with a number of American missionary children attending a boarding school in town and, over the years, developed close friendships with them and, eventually, with their sons. The basis for these friendships was a common passion for hunting. This passion and the friendships it made possible came to dominate Dil Das's life.When Joseph S. Alter, one of the boys who had hunted with Dil Das, became an adult and a scholar, he set out to write the life history of Dil Das as a way of exploring Garhwali peasant culture. But Alter found his friend uninterested in talking about traditional ethnographic subjects, such as community life, family, or work. Instead, Dil Das spoke almost exclusively about hunting with his American friends-telling endless tales about friendship and hunting that seemed to have nothing to do with peasant culture.When Dil Das died in 1986, Alter put the project away. Years later, he began rereading Dil Das's stories, this time from a completely new perspective. Instead of looking for information about peasant culture, he was able to see that Dil Das was talking against culture. From this viewpoint Dil Das's narrative made sense for precisely those reasons that had earlier seemed to render it useless-his apparent indifference toward details of everyday life, his obsession with hunting, and, above all, his celebration of friendship.To a degree in fact, but most significantly in Dil Das's memory, hunting served to merge his and the missionary boys' identities and, thereby, to supersede and render irrelevant all differences of class, caste, and nationality. For Dil Das the intimate experience of hunting together radically decentered the prevailing structure of power and enabled him to redefine himself outside the framework of normal social classification.Thus, Knowing Dil Das is not about peasant culture but about the limits of culture and history. And it is about the moral ambiguity of writing and living in a field of power where, despite intimacy, self and other are unequal.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2022)