Biography
Shivangi Pareek is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests at the intersection of Indigenous cultural production, anthropology and arts, material cultures studies and environmental humanities. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department at Yale University and her dissertation project is entitled ‘Contemporary Patterns: Making Adivasi Artists and Art in Post Colonial India’.
Paper Abstract
In what ways do contemporary Adivasi stories and ‘art’ visualize a form of ‘environmental aesthetics’ that propose alternative imaginaries of human-environment relations rooted in modalities of care, devotion and spiritual relations with the environment? Working with painted artworks and oral stories by Adivasi-Indigenous artists of Central India, the paper will examine how complex understanding of natural environments and lived environmental experiences find expression in contemporary Adivasi-Indigenous visual cultures. Through a particular story of the Narmada river and examining artworks depicting this story painted by contemporary artists, the paper explores an intricate relationship between religion and ecology in the South Asian Adivasi context. The paper also proposes Adivasi or South Asian Indigenous imaginaries and lifeworlds as participants in global discourses as they respond to some of the most urgent needs in the current environmental crisis and propose alternative models of imagining human-environment relations.