Entangled Lives

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.

'Entangled Lives builds on the fundamental insight that history is always interspecies history. With elegance and in-depth knowledge, Joy Pachuau and Willem van Schendel outline a new mode of writing history where the lives of animals and plants matter and where scholars have to rethink taken for granted geographies and temporalities. This is a highly ambitious project that takes us from the movement of tectonic plates to indigenous cosmologies in the region that they aptly name the 'Eastern Himalayan Triangle'. It is a marvellous read, a book full of telling accounts of human care for elephants, mithun, bamboo, areca nut and other living beings. Through these entangled histories of co-becoming, we face the larger question of how to survive on a damaged planet.' Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholm University, Sweden

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