LEADER 05106nam 2200745Ia 450 001 9910779146603321 005 20230422050730.0 010 $a1-283-89736-9 010 $a0-8122-0475-1 024 7 $a10.9783/9780812204759 035 $a(CKB)2550000000104552 035 $a(OCoLC)794926019 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebrary10576093 035 $a(SSID)ssj0000607358 035 $a(PQKBManifestationID)11385414 035 $a(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000607358 035 $a(PQKBWorkID)10585024 035 $a(PQKB)11619921 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC3441653 035 $a(MdBmJHUP)muse11950 035 $a(DE-B1597)449273 035 $a(OCoLC)979622870 035 $a(DE-B1597)9780812204759 035 $a(Au-PeEL)EBL3441653 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebr10576093 035 $a(CaONFJC)MIL420986 035 $a(OCoLC)932312610 035 $a(EXLCZ)992550000000104552 100 $a19990507d2000 uy 0 101 0 $aeng 135 $aurcn||||||||| 181 $ctxt 182 $cc 183 $acr 200 10$aKnowing Dil Das$b[electronic resource] $estories of a Himalayan hunter /$fJoseph S. Alter 210 $aPhiladelphia $cUniversity of Pennsylvania Press$dc2000 215 $a1 online resource (212 p.) 225 1 $aContemporary ethnography 300 $aBibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph 311 $a0-8122-1712-8 320 $aIncludes bibliographical references (p. [185]-186) and index. 327 $t Frontmatter -- $tContents -- $tPreface -- $tPart I. Bal Kand / The Book of Childhood -- $tChapter 1. Dil Das-Enslaved Heart -- $tChapter 2. Woodstock School: Protestants, Peasants, and Ethics -- $tChapter 3. A Tiger's Tale -- $tPart II. Aranya Kand / The Forest Book -- $tChapter 4. Coapman's Fall -- $tChapter 5. Hearts of Darkness -- $tChapter 6. Land Masters: Purebred History -- $tPart III. Shram Kand / The Book of Labor -- $tChapter 7. Dairying: An Untold Story -- $tChapter 8. Slippage: Out of Work, Through Hunting -- $tChapter 9. The Terms of Friendship -- $tPart IV. Uttarkhand / Himalaya -- $tChapter 10. The Heart of the Matter -- $tChapter 11. A Hybrid History of Encounter -- $tGlossary -- $tNotes -- $tAcknowledgments -- $tIndex 330 $aDil 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. 410 0$aContemporary ethnography. 606 $aCulture conflict$zIndia$zGarhwa?l 606 $aEthnology$zIndia$zGarhwa?l 606 $aFriendship$zIndia$zGarhwa?l 606 $aHunters$zIndia$zGarhwa?l$vBiography 607 $aGarhwa?l (India)$vBiography 610 $aAnthropology. 610 $aFolklore. 610 $aLinguistics. 615 0$aCulture conflict 615 0$aEthnology 615 0$aFriendship 615 0$aHunters 676 $a305.8/00954 700 $aAlter$b Joseph S$01006617 801 0$bMiAaPQ 801 1$bMiAaPQ 801 2$bMiAaPQ 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910779146603321 996 $aKnowing Dil Das$93757958 997 $aUNINA