Displacement, Rehabilitation, and Social Change
The Case of the Paraja Highlanders
Description:... Studies on displacement and rehabilitation have occupied centre stage in the contemporary discourse on development issues. The primary concern of these studies revolved around the issues of economic vs social cost, the local antagonism towards big dams, the policy of the state on displacement and rehabilitation and the macro-level evaluation of large dams. They either condemned, in an emotional way, the Government's insensitivity towards the alarming issue of displacement or highlighted the immediate effect of dislocation. Most of these studies treated the displaced peopel as homogeneous entity ingnoring thereby the cultural variations. Such a trend threw little light on the intricate relationship between social life and displacement. Anthropological studies on the impact of dislocation and resettlemtn on the social structure of the displaced community, especially focussing on the process of change, have rarely been undertaken. By incisiverly analysing the impact of displacement and rehabilitation on the social structure of the Paraja, a hill tribe of highland Orissa, this bok has gone beyond the traditional framework of understanding displacement and involuntary resettlement.
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