Knowing Dil Das : stories of a Himalayan hunter /

Dil 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...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Alter, Joseph S.
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, ©2000.
Series:Contemporary ethnography.
Subjects:
Online Access:CONNECT
CONNECT

MARC

LEADER 00000cam a2200000Ma 4500
001 mig00005518995
006 m o d
007 cr |||||||nn|n
008 990507s2000 pau obd 001 0 eng
005 20230818144517.7
010 |z  99032283  
019 |a 929156949  |a 932312610  |a 961618470  |a 962602547  |a 979622870  |a 1058673622  |a 1097084921  |a 1162248518  |a 1290095520  |a 1303502351 
020 |a 9780812204759  |q (electronic bk.) 
020 |a 0812204751  |q (electronic bk.) 
020 |a 9780812235241 
020 |a 081223524X 
020 |z 081223524X  |q (cloth ;  |q alk. paper) 
020 |z 0812217128  |q (paper ;  |q alk. paper) 
020 |z 9780812217124 
020 |a 1283897369 
020 |a 9781283897365 
024 7 |a 10.9783/9780812204759  |2 doi 
035 |a 1WRLDSHRocn794926019 
035 |a (OCoLC)794926019  |z (OCoLC)929156949  |z (OCoLC)932312610  |z (OCoLC)961618470  |z (OCoLC)962602547  |z (OCoLC)979622870  |z (OCoLC)1058673622  |z (OCoLC)1097084921  |z (OCoLC)1162248518  |z (OCoLC)1290095520  |z (OCoLC)1303502351 
037 |a 22573/ctt35cskx  |b JSTOR 
040 |a Nz  |b eng  |e pn  |c UV0  |d E7B  |d OCLCO  |d OCLCQ  |d OCLCA  |d IDEBK  |d ALSTP  |d OCLCA  |d OCLCQ  |d JSTOR  |d P@U  |d OCLCF  |d NLGGC  |d YDXCP  |d COO  |d OCLCQ  |d EBLCP  |d OCLCQ  |d AZK  |d LOA  |d COCUF  |d OCLCQ  |d OCLCO  |d MOR  |d PIFAG  |d ZCU  |d OCLCQ  |d MERUC  |d OCLCQ  |d W2U  |d IOG  |d OCLCO  |d DEGRU  |d U3W  |d EZ9  |d OCLCQ  |d OCLCO  |d STF  |d WRM  |d NRAMU  |d CRU  |d ICG  |d VTS  |d OCLCQ  |d OCLCO  |d TXC  |d VT2  |d AU@  |d WYU  |d OCLCQ  |d LVT  |d TKN  |d LEAUB  |d DKC  |d OCLCQ  |d OCLCO  |d OCL  |d OCLCQ  |d ESU  |d VLY  |d INARC  |d VHC  |d OCLCO  |d OCLCQ 
043 |a a-ii--- 
049 |a TXMM 
050 4 |a GN635.I4  |b A727 2000 
082 0 4 |a 305.8/00954  |2 21 
100 1 |a Alter, Joseph S. 
245 1 0 |a Knowing Dil Das :  |b stories of a Himalayan hunter /  |c Joseph S. Alter. 
260 |a Philadelphia :  |b University of Pennsylvania Press,  |c ©2000. 
300 |a 1 online resource (xvii, 193 pages) 
336 |a text  |b txt  |2 rdacontent 
337 |a computer  |b c  |2 rdamedia 
338 |a online resource  |b cr  |2 rdacarrier 
347 |a text file  |b PDF  |2 rda 
380 |a Dictionary 
490 1 |a Contemporary Ethnography 
504 |a Includes bibliographical references (pages 185-186) and index. 
588 0 |a Print version record. 
505 0 |a Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Preface; Part I. Bal Kand / The Book of Childhood; Chapter 1. Dil Das-Enslaved Heart; Chapter 2. Woodstock School: Protestants, Peasants, and Ethics; Chapter 3. A Tiger's Tale; Part II. Aranya Kand / The Forest Book; Chapter 4. Coapman's Fall; Chapter 5. Hearts of Darkness; Chapter 6. Land Masters: Purebred History; Part III. Shram Kand / The Book of Labor; Chapter 7. Dairying: An Untold Story; Chapter 8. Slippage: Out of Work, Through Hunting; Chapter 9. The Terms of Friendship; Part IV. Uttarkhand / Himalaya; Chapter 10. The Heart of the Matter. 
505 8 |a Chapter 11. A Hybrid History of EncounterGlossary; Notes; Acknowledgments; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; R; S; T; U; V; W. 
546 |a This edition in English. 
520 |a Dil 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. 
500 |a Books at JSTOR Evidence Based Acquisitions  |5 TMurS 
500 |a Project MUSE Universal EBA Ebooks  |5 TMurS 
600 1 0 |a Das, Dil,  |d -1986. 
650 0 |a Hunters  |z India  |z Garhwāl  |v Biography. 
650 0 |a Friendship  |z India  |z Garhwāl. 
650 0 |a Culture conflict  |z India  |z Garhwāl. 
650 0 |a Ethnology  |z India  |z Garhwāl. 
651 0 |a Garhwāl (India)  |v Biography. 
655 7 |a Biographies.  |2 fast  |0 (OCoLC)fst01919896 
730 0 |a WORLDSHARE SUB RECORDS 
776 0 8 |i Print version:  |a Alter, Joseph S.  |t Knowing Dil Das.  |d Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, ©2000  |w (DLC) 99032283 
830 0 |a Contemporary ethnography. 
856 4 0 |u https://ezproxy.mtsu.edu/login?url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctt3fj1dr  |z CONNECT  |3 JSTOR  |t 0 
856 4 0 |u https://ezproxy.mtsu.edu/login?url=https://muse.jhu.edu/book/1151  |z CONNECT  |3 Project MUSE 
949 |a ho0 
994 |a 92  |b TXM 
998 |a wi  |d z 
999 f f |s 85db27d5-ea32-482e-a873-057f016236a7  |i 93bf71d1-9963-48c2-b84b-50ee390d83ec  |t 0 
952 f f |a Middle Tennessee State University  |b Main  |c James E. Walker Library  |d Electronic Resources  |t 0  |e GN635.I4 A727 2000  |h Library of Congress classification