CfA: PhD position on environment as heritage in the Himalayas at Leiden University (4 years)
The project, ‘Futuring Heritage: Conservation, Community and Contestation in the Eastern Himalayas’, led by Dr. Erik de Maaker, funded by a grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), is looking for a PhD candidate for research in Sikkim (India). This 4-year PhD posistion is fully funded, and open to applicants from South Asia or elsewhere, who meet the requirements stated in the call (see the link below). The project is hosted by Leiden University’s Institute of Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology, with Ashoka University in Delhi-NCR as its prime academic partner. The PhD will be jointly supervised by Dr. Erik de Maaker (Leiden) and Dr. Swargajyoti Gohain (Ashoka). The Futuring Heritage project consortium encompasses international organisations, Indian governmental agencies, several NGOs as well as a tourism operator active in the eastern Himalayas.
Futuring Heritage investigates how national and international/ governmental and non-governmental programmes aimed at environmental conservation and climate change adaptation in the eastern Himalayas can align with the cultural expectations of the region’s ethnolinguistic minorities. While such programmes are typically presented as ‘community-led’, they often adopt a condescending stance towards residents’ traditional usages of forests, rivers and mountain slopes, which are cultural practices, rooted in the past. Rural Himalayan livelihoods as well as schemes intended to halt deforestation and sustain biodiversity encompass heritage, either authorised, neglected or unseen. Yet, such activities also anticipate time to come, an intentionality the project innovatively conceptualises as ‘futuring’. This project researches futuring pertaining to usages and perceptions of land, developing new spatial methodologies that integrate satellite imagery with ethnographic sensorial mapping. It explores acts of futuring with reference to spatiality and temporality that reveal how heritage, ontology, indigeneity and governance are essential dimensions of socially and culturally inclusive environmental conservation. To address this issue, the project enables ethnographic research across three sub-projects, all located in the eastern Himalayas of India, and thus sharing the same national context.
This PhD position supports ethnographic research in the Indian state of Sikkim, which is often considered an example of successful community-led environmental conservation. In 2016, Sikkim achieved the status of being the first ‘fully organically producing’ state of India and its Khangchendzonga National Park (KNP) became a UNESCO World Heritage site in the mixed category, recognised for both its cultural as well as natural heritage values. This has altered the way stakeholders interact with each other, in line with differences in how they perceive and value the mountain range and the forests covering its slopes. How does the ‘recognised’ and ‘authorised’ worthiness of a place as World Heritage influence the restriction, alteration and initiation of both human and non-human residents’ access to the farmlands and forests surrounding it, and have implications in terms of situated ritual practices and rural livelihood strategies and the heritagised resources these encompass?
More information about the project, and the qualifications required in the call. Please share among those who might be interested! Deadline October 1st.
More information at: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/vacatures/2024/q3/15102-phd-position-in-social-anthropology