Defensa de la propiedad y mantenimiento de la señalización

This dissertation draws on two published articles, one under-review article, and two unpublished articles, the last chapter is the conclusion that summarizes the findings of these chapters and presents my future research directions. Below, I include the abstract of each article/chapter and their publication status.

Chapter 2: Animating the Sacred, Sentient and Supernatural

Materialist and post-humanist scholarship within the discipline has opened up exciting philosophical and theoretical possibilities with which to understand both human and nonhuman worlds. Yet, recent scholarship has been critical of the modern secular tendencies within this approach especially in its lack of engagement with sacred, sentient, and spiritual accounts and experiences. The aim of this review is twofold. First it provides an overview of the concerns that drive the most recent work in materialist and post-humanist approaches in geography. Second, it presents perspectives from the subfields of indigenous and religious geographies and disciplines like anthropology, religious studies, literary fiction, and post-colonial studies that speak directly to these concerns. The review is divided into three sections. The first section provides a cursory overview of recent materialist and post-humanist work in geography. Surveying recent reviews from prominent geography journals, three categories relevant for the present discussion have been identified: resource geographies, urban materialities, and the Anthropocene. The second section examines three approaches which grapple with similar concerns but offer quite a

different approach: indigenous ontologies, imaginative geographies, and geographies of religion and western spiritual epistemes. The conclusion draws linkages between the first and the second sections to argue for a more robust theoretical engagement with the sacred, sentient, and spiritual

Chapter 3: Precarity and Possibility: On Being Young and Indigenous in Sikkim, India

In the last decade the Indian Power Ministry began an aggressive campaign for hydropower development in its ten Himalayan states. Twenty-nine of these dams were commissioned for construction in the small Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim. In June 2007 Dzongu a protected reserve of the indigenous Lepchas in North Sikkim became the center of controversy when reserve youth went on a hunger strike against seven dams planned within the reserve. Their protests garnered enough national and international attention to cancel four of the seven dams. However within the reserve there was very little support for the activists who were seen as educated, upper class youth, most of whom had studied and lived outside the reserve. In this article I narrow the focus on the Dzongu youth and demonstrate how contestations between State and indigenous groups often pry open profound contestations within these groups. In tracing the trajectory of the Dzongu activists after the protests I examine how they are redefining indigeneity, beyond and sometimes in conflict with former connotations. I argue that the anti- dam protests became a way for Dzongu youth to question state-led development agendas as well as elders and urban elite who spoke on behalf of the community. Building on literature in

indigeneity and geographies of young people, this research draws on the authors M.A. research (2007-10), two pre-dissertation surveys (2011, 2012) and ongoing fieldwork. The Indian Himalayan region is home to several indigenous groups and is the site of intense geo-political anxiety given its proximity to China and Pakistan. I argue that an attention to young people’s political articulations can provide a valuable lens in analyzing the politics of nation building, the politics of difference and the shifting political subjectivities of marginalized groups.

The Indian Himalayan Region, a climate change hotspot, is witnessing a massive surge in hydropower development alongside an increase in natural hazard events. The focus of this paper is on indigenous people’s response to ecological precarity, beyond more legible instances of social movements or resistance. Through an ethnographic case study of a 6.9 magnitude earthquake in the eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, the site of controversial hydropower

projects and an indigenous anti-dam protest, I show how marginalized people’s relationship with a sacred, animate landscape exceed both scholarly and activist notions of politics. Many in Sikkim believe the earthquake was caused by mountain deities, angered by the desecration of its sacred physiography. While activists point to these events as a sign of the moral and political failure of the state, for non-activist tribe members they raise deeper cosmological concerns. While not easily translatable into political action, these concerns signal tensions between the minority indigenous religion and the more pervasive Tibetan Buddhism, a history that precedes and undergirds contemporary political and ecological transformations. I suggest these spiritual narratives are grounded in a longer history of the contested relationship between marginalized peoples and hegemonic state and non-state powers. In this, I offer a critique of recent post- humanist and materialist scholarship and its lack of engagement with indigenous and subaltern ontologies. I highlight the relationship between natural hazards, sacred landscapes, and

indigenous groups, to argue for a more holistic approach to the uneven impacts of climate change on mountainous environments and their inhabitants.

Chapter 5: Geological Anxieties in the Anthropocene at the Unruly Borders of the Indian State:

The increased frequency of earthquakes and landslides especially near dam construction sites, along with incidents of shamanic possession by angered mountain deities, has raised

Himalayan borderlands. The Nesol, a sacred Buddhist ritual text, warns devotees that desecrating the scared landscape of Beyul Demajong, the Tibetan name for Sikkim, can result in natural disasters and socio-political unrest. In official reports, Sikkim’s ‘adverse geological conditions’ have been described as ‘unpredictable’ and ‘volatile’ (in Kohli 2011:21). As project developers soon discover, these projects don’t flow uninterrupted into inert, empty spaces (Tsing 2005). Instead, they encounter ‘geological surprises’ (Indian Power Ministry 2008: 27), which delay projects or worse, result in the loss of human life, laying bare the ecological and cosmological limits of capitalism. In this article, I put recent materialist and post-humanist scholarship on the Anthropocene in conversation with indigenous and decolonial theorizing to understand how geo- physical indeterminacy is deployed by both regional technocrats and indigenous groups, to critique the hegemony of ‘national interest’. I explore indigenous and technocratic narratives, to interrogate how heightened indeterminacy is mediating and productive of a borderland

subjectivity grounded in the geo-physical and spiritual particularity of the region. In this my attempt is to demonstrate the importance of indeterminacy and a ‘critical geographic

mobilization of place’ (Jazeel 2011) for environmental politics and marginalized subjectivities in the Anthropocene.

Chapter 6: Concrete or Clay? Eco-Tourism and the Contentious Politics of Designing Lepcha

Indigeneity

In the last few years, Dzongu, a reserve of the indigenous Lepcha tribe of Sikkim in India, has gained immense popularity as an eco-tourism destination. This success is fuelled by a now well-known youth led movement against state sponsored hydropower projects which has produced a compelling narrative for the conscientious ‘eco-tourist. Even as eco-tourism emerges as a viable option for Dzongu’s growing ranks of educated unemployed youth, the proliferation

of concrete structures through state housing initiatives is seen as a threat by young entrepreneurs to the ‘rustic’ authenticity of the reserve. Most successful eco-tourism homestays are run by anti- dam activists who are eager to retain traditional architectural styles and the associated skill and knowledge but lack political clout and therefore have little control over what plans and projects enter the village. This article examines how decisions related to Dzongu’s built environment are incendiary issues closely linked to ongoing political and cultural negotiations. Contestations over the design, aesthetics, and architecture of eco-tourism infrastructure are intimately tied to ideas of indigeneity and authenticity, inter-generational gaps, and electoral politics. Building on

literature in indigeneity, spatial politics, critical design studies, and geographies of young people, this paper explores the material and spatial production and contestation of state practices to understand how young people from marginalized groups navigate unemployment, exclusionary state practices, and inter-generational expectations.