Entangled Lives
Human-Animal-Plant Histories of the Eastern Himalayan Triangle

It is a case study in environmental history, multispecies history, more-than-human history, posthumanism, and environmental humanities.

Joy L. K. Pachuau (Author), Willem van Schendel (Author)

9781009215473, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 November 2022

315 pages
23.7 x 16.1 x 2.6 cm, 0.6 kg

'Entangled Lives – the first more-than-human history of the Eastern Himalayan Triangle by two master historians – is a groundbreaking text on the accounts of storying the intertwinement of Himalayan geology, homo sapiens, animals, and plants in the span of 40,000 years, overcoming modern anthropocentric historiographies' blindness to nonhuman lifeworlds, and recounting the co-creating, co-becoming, and co-transforming roles of humans and nonhumans who have together shaped the shared habitability of the Triangle. The authors' planetary engagement with a regional interspecies history critically reaffirms the invaluable role of more-than-human perspectives in our understanding of locally-manifested planetary challenges!' Dan Smyer Yü, Yunnan University, China; International Faculty Member, Universität zu Köln, Germany

This book considers three questions about understanding the past. How can we rethink human histories by including animals and plants? How can we overcome nationally territorialised narratives? And how can we balance academic history-writing and indigenous understandings of history? This is a tentative foray into the connections between these questions. Entangled Lives explore them for a large area that has seldom been explored in academic inquiry. The 'Eastern Himalayan Triangle' includes both uplands and lowlands. The region is the meeting point of three global biodiversity hotspots connecting India and China across Myanmar/Burma, Bangladesh and Bhutan. The 'Triangle' is treated as a multispecies site in which human histories have always been utterly intertwined with plant and animal histories. It foregrounds that history is co-created – it is always interspecies history – but that its contours are locally specific.

List of Maps
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. The Deep Past: 1. An Epic Crash
2. Human Beginnings
3. Changing the Environment
4. Livelihoods
Part II. Cosmologies: 5. Stories of Human Origins
6. Human-animal Histories
7. Human-plant Histories
Part III. More-Than-Human Histories: 8. Cultural geographies
9. Exploiting Natural Resources
10. Dealing with Environmental Decay
11. The Elephant Strikes Back
Conclusion
Bibliography
Copyrights and Sources
Index.

Subject Areas: Local history [WQH], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Asian history [HBJF], History [HB]