In this episode of Shillong Reading Room, Erik de Maaker, Associate Professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, discusses his book ‘Reworking Culture: Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in Garo Hills, North East India’. The book offers intimate insights into the lives of farmers in the Garo Hills of Northeast India. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it focuses on followers of traditional Garo animism, for whom land remains their most important resource. In response to new economic and political opportunities, as well as shifts in the ontological landscape, people continually reinterpret the relationships that bind them together as a community and shape their connections with spirits and the land.

Currently, he is co-leading a multinational collaborative research project on landscape, environment, and climate change in the eastern Himalayas, in partnership with the Himalayan University Consortium and International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). Meghalaya is one of the project’s field sites.