Abstract

This article, based on my doctoral research, is grounded in an indigenous tribal, and community-first land-centred theoretical approach where I used a participatory multi-sited ethnography to explore what land means to the Bodos and how land is lived, practiced, remembered, and contested in everyday life. It argues that land among the Bodos cannot be reduced to a physical or geographic object. Rather, land should be held as a social, political, economic, cultural, relational and spiritual field that structures community life, informs identity, and shapes the experience of survival. Methodologically, I foreground my locationing as a Bodo scholar and the ethical implications of researching my own community through a reflexive, participatory, and relational framework within the indigenous tribal epistemological domain. The article is organised around the study’s research problem, theoretical orientation, field sites, fieldwork process, and analytic approach, while also highlighting the ways in which my field experience became inseparable from the knowledge produced. I conclude by reflecting on the significance of land-centred indigenous tribal research for understanding Bodo life-world and for opening space for respectful and community-rooted scholarship.

Keywords: Bodos, land, indigenous tribal research, participatory multi-sited ethnography, community-first land-centered framework

Introduction

Land occupies a central place in the life-world of the Bodos, and here, I contend that this centrality cannot be understood through a narrow, extractive, or merely material definition. In the present article, land is approached as a lived relation and as a field of meaning that is social, political, economic, cultural, spiritual, and relational at once. The article grows out of my doctoral research project that set out to explore the meaning held and practices of land among the Bodos of India using an indigenous tribal research framework of community-first land-centred theoretical approach (Styres & Zinga, 2013) and participatory multi-sited ethnographic design (Marcus, 2009).

The significance of the study was in its attempt to address a gap in scholarship on the Bodos and land, noting that the concept and meaning of land among the Bodos had not been studied through the methodological framework used here. With this as a background, the research also hoped to illuminate the relationship embedded in the profound experiences of conflict and violence in the region (Narzary, 2017) and how the people and lands survived through it all. In this sense, my focus is on land as an object of inquiry and how it illuminates land as a site through which community memory, identity, struggle, and continuance are understood.

At the conceptual level, the study departs from research traditions that fragment land into separate domains. It insists that land be approached in totality. I reject the reductionist understandings that confine land to merely physical or geographic, and in its place, present land as encompassing physical, material, geographical, economic, political, spiritual, and relational dimensions. This orientation is consistent with the indigenous tribal broader epistemology concerning indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and community-guided knowledge production, where community voice is privileged and academia is repositioned as a respectful but marginalised voice (Smith L. T., 2012).

In this connection, I advance three linked arguments. First, this article shows that the research of land among the Bodos is inseparable from the community-first ethical and epistemological commitments. Second, it argues that my own locationing as a Bodo scholar was not a supplementary biographical detail but a constitutive part of the research process and its interpretive depth. Third, it suggests that the meanings and practices of land among the Bodos emerge most clearly when viewed through participatory and engaged ethnography in everyday lived reality, rather than through detached or externally imposed frames.

Intellectual risks and research gap

Initially, I identified four research gaps that motivated the study. First, existing ethnographic scholarship on the land of the Bodos has largely emphasised culturo-anthropological dimensions, especially culture-related aspects of land, while paying insufficient attention to territoriality, identity, and polity as central socio-political concerns (see for example, Endle, 1910; Siiger, 2015). Second, socio-political discourse has tended to remain silent on the cultural dimensions that anthropological approaches stress, producing a partial and uneven account of land (see for example, Choudhury, 2007). Third, economic approaches that tie land to development, resources, forests, agriculture, displacement, and conflict have failed to portray the cultural processes that shape tribal relationships with land in a holistic way (see for example, Fernandes & Bharali, 2011, and, Fernandes & Barbora, 2009). Fourth, and crucially for the method adopted here, few studies of the Bodos’ relationship with land have been conducted through the lens of the Bodo worldview. Instead, earlier studies have privileged the discourse of the researcher, whether colonial ethnographer, contemporary Indian researcher, or even Bodo researcher working from an etic stance (Narzary & Daimary, 2022).

These gaps are significant because they shape how Bodo life has been read and represented. I see that a partial account of land becomes a partial account of the community itself. If land is reduced to culture alone, or to political territory alone, or to economic resource alone, the relational totality of Bodo life is obscured. Therefore, I framed the research problem as one of both epistemic and socio-politico-cultural significance. My task was to ask what land meant to the Bodos, how meaning was given through ideational and material practices, how state land policy shaped and reshaped community-land relations, and how these transformations affected socio-cultural, economic, political, and spiritual processes across historical periods.

I retained this focus because it is precisely in the articulation of these questions that the contribution of my study becomes visible. The issue highlighted was not to be only how the Bodos use land, own land, or live on land, but the deeper question of how land itself participated in the making of community life, memory, and identity, and how these relations have been reworked through policy, struggles, and historical change. I contend that land is at once a material base and a site of meaning. The article follows that insight closely.

Conceptual and Theoretical Orientation

The study is grounded in a community-first land-centred theoretical framework through engagement with Styres and Zinga’s (2013) work on land-based research as a model for autonomy, sovereignty and self-determination of indigenous tribal peoples. The framework insists that community is the privileged voice that guides the research process, while academia remains a respected but marginalised voice. It also creates an ethical space governed by honouring relationships, respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility (Kovach, 2009; Smith L. T., 2012).

This theoretical stance necessitated that the study explicitly rejects a paternalising empowerment model in favour of a more relational and transformative engagement. It is therefore not enough for research to extract information from the community and transform it into academic output. The research frames the process as a reciprocal and community-grounded practice in which knowledge is co-constituted through interaction and respect (see for example, bodhi s., 2020).

The study was calibrated within a wider domain of research paradigms. Ontologically, the research adhered to the subjectivist position holding that reality is dependent on social actors and is constructed through social life (Mouton & Marais, 1996). Epistemologically, the interpretivist and constructivist approaches, as in the present research, acknowledged context, subjectivity, and practical interpretation (Creswell, 2009). Axiologically, the study emphasised that research is never value-neutral, and that it was explicitly committed to honouring difference, relationships, reciprocity, survival, and sustenance of communities (Akhup, 2013).

Taken together, these dimensions positioned the study within an indigenous tribal epistemological paradigm that seeks to resuscitate and reclaim indigenous tribal ways of knowing (Kovach, 2009). In this way, the study posited that research must honour relationships, respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility in ways that are contextualised to the specific community and its needs. For this reason, the article treats theory as inseparable from ethics, and ethics from community life (see for example, Ziipao, 2018).

Methodological Design

Participatory multi-sited ethnographic research design was chosen because it allowed me to work across spatial and temporal dimensions while remaining attentive to lived realities, community relations, and changing meanings of land (see for example, Kumar, 2002, and, Marcus, 2009). This is an exploratory design that moves away from the individualist ethnographic gaze and toward the collective and relational nature of ethnography (Narzary & Daimary, 2022). In this framing, the research does not merely observe a community from the outside. It seeks to understand the complex system of relations that defines social life.

In this context, the fieldwork combined participatory community mapping with ethnographic methods, namely, engaged observation, in-depth interviews, group interviews, key informant conversations, and community sharing. Community mapping tools focused on land, and included social mapping, resource mapping, mobility mapping, historical timeline, trends analysis, daily activity schedules for men, women, and children, and relation-related maps. These tools generated information on spatial, temporal, and relational dimensions of land as practiced in the study area. At the same time, ethnographic tools enabled the drawing out of oral histories, narratives and shared reflections uncovering the complex web of meanings associated with land. All data were gathered in Bodo, transcribed, and translated, and thematic analysis was used to identify narrative identities, themes, propositions, patterns, and relationships among the data.

I do not elaborate beyond this, because the methodological details are the focus of this article. So long as I used the analytic process which is consistent with the study’s broader commitment to relational, contextual, and community-grounded interpretation, where the control of research is shared with the community and provided space for their participation and interests, the study hoped to meet the decolonizing act of researching in the context of the Bodos. As I was also mindful of the idea of “reverse anthropology” which entailed that when the researched becomes the researcher, research strategies must be reformulated to reclaim and revitalise communities and their worldviews (Akhup, 2013). Within this framework, the study is not neutral in the conventional sense. It is explicitly oriented towards the epistemic and ethical reclamation of Bodo knowledge.

Field Sites and the Geography of Relation

The field sites for the study were two villages in the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts: Kumarsali Fwthar in Chirang district and Hatirtary in Baksa district. Their location near the Indo-Bhutan international border is noted as significant because it offered insights into cross-border relationships that shaped land relations of the Bodos since time immemorial. The two villages are approximately 100 kilometres apart in the geographical map of the Bodoland Territorial Region in Assam, India, and although both are described as having the attributes and characteristics of Bodo villages, they differ in a variety of composition. These details indicated that land is lived differently in distinct geo-socio-cultural settings (see for example, Escobar, 2001). Herein, I do not develop a comparative analysis, but do establish that these sites enabled the collection of useful information about the everyday practice around land and the meanings associated with it in the community life of the Bodos.

Sources and Data

The study used both primary and secondary sources of data. Primary data included information generated through interviews, group and community sharing, community mapping, and engaged observation. Secondary data sources included land records, documentaries, library collections, mass and social media material, census data, ecological and demographic data, personal documents such as diaries, autobiographies, letters, and case studies. This combination was consistent with the study’s effort to understand land in both lived and documented forms.

This framing of data collection process is notable for its persistence in the formulation that the community’s own modes of knowing are central to the process. The question to ask was: How the Bodos create knowledge? The methodological response to this was that it is done not in formal academic institutional spaces alone, but in everyday interactions, mundane activities, and social, political, economic, and spiritual events and celebrations as well as struggles of the community. The study therefore approaches data as something produced in a relational process and cannot be simply extracted from participants.

Researcher positionality grounded in Indigenous Tribal locationing

I say that one of the most distinctive features of the study was the extended reflection on my locationing as a researcher. It provided me a reflexive space as a Bodo scholar and an indigenous tribal person who has lived with the effects of discrimination, brutality, criminalisation, and marginalisation faced by tribal communities in contemporary times (see for example, Xaxa, et al., 2014). This positionality also corroborated with the experiences of other fellow indigenous tribal researchers and was not presented as a mere autobiographical aside (see for example, Swargiary, B., 2025). Here, I note that a researcher’s positionality is key to understand the kind of knowledge the research aim to produce.

Thus, I adhere to the fact that locationing the self is an integral feature of research on indigenous tribal communities and that it may be expressed through first-person reflective narrative (bodhi s., 2020). As a researcher, it is impossible for one to reproduce the journey as though it were a detached testimony, because my experience helped me frame it as a lived basis for research. I began my locationing with a reflexive account of my childhood experiences, and how the child in me witnessed debilitating years of fear, trauma, grief and suffering due to the ongoing Bodo struggle for survival, while also reliving the joys, happiness and resilience made possible in an indigenous tribal communitarian existence due to its close-knit social structure.

I recounted growing up in a typical Bodo joint family, with many members sharing small huts and a common kitchen, remembering an early life structured by labour, care, and communitarian organisation. Daily life involved elders rising early, women pounding rice, men going to the fields with bulls, and we as children, carrying food to the fields, gallivanting in the meadows and swimming in the rivers.

Rather painful for me it is though, I cannot but recount the horrors of growing up in a conflict affected Bodoland region. I was witness to several acts of atrocities, everyday violence and surveillance directed towards the community. Several such incidents touched my being deeply as it revolved around friends, relatives and neighbours who survived violence. Life had to move on in spite of it all. I as a child had the privilege of completing school, as a youth could complete my college education, and as a young professional could earn a living, unlike many others whose potentials, dreams and aspirations were all truncated by the vagaries of the conflict. Men, women and children, there could have been none who would have not been affected by it all.

At the same time, my locationing exercise also revealed that it had a healing effect on me. It broadened my worldview greatly. It afforded me the space to reflect deeper about I as a researcher, my life and relationships, and the contexts in which I survive and exist. I was none the worse for it, as my research became a space for revisiting and reworking the self within community relationships. I could recollect these memories from the position of a Bodo researcher studying how land was embedded in a communitarian rhythm of life and that which shaped my own formation. Just like my village elders insisted that life must continue, that the community must survive, and that one must remain rooted while continuing the struggle for a better world, I could see the world with a new sense of empathy and optimism. It helped me fathom how my study evolved as much towards recovery and reconnection as it was to land.

I presented these episodes as contexts for understanding the conditions under which I and the members of my community lived and survived. These experiences have informed my constitution as a researcher and thereby shape my continuous search for answers. They also deepened my central argument of the research where I say that land among the Bodos is inseparable from the experience of vulnerability and struggle for survival. Thus, this reflexive exercise of locationing gave my fieldwork a greater ethical and historical depth.

Fieldwork as Relational Practice

The fieldwork process itself was one of the research’s most important component on how knowledge is made. At Kumarsali Fwthar and Hatirtary, I was able to stay in village settings for prolonged periods, revisit community processes from within, and practise respect, reciprocity, and relationality. The fieldwork enabled not only data collection but also a deepened understanding of Bodo narratives on land and the values attached to it.

Yet the fieldwork was also marked by material hardship and infrastructural deficits. I was able to see that the villages had inadequate access to basic amenities such as water, electricity, transportation, books, computers, healthcare facilities, internet, and quality educational infrastructure. These conditions formed part of the environment in which land relations are lived and understood. I found that such infrastructural constraints shaped the context of my fieldwork and the community’s everyday reality.

My role also changed across time. Prior to undertaking my doctoral research, I was seen as a highly successful scholar ‘with much knowledge’, someone expected to solve problems in the community. Later, on beginning my doctoral research journey, it required me to return as a learner, drawing on the knowledge of elders, uncles, aunts, brothers, and sisters who had not had the opportunity to study in schools and higher education institutions. This shift required me to shed biases and prejudices, and dominant perspectives, and to resocialise into Bodo communicative and behavioural norms with humility and respect. This comes as a crucial methodological insight and a necessity for an indigenous tribal research project.

Also, indigenous tribal research, as I experienced, requires a willingness to work at the pace of the community rather than at the pace of an externally imposed schedule. I had gone prepared for the fieldwork with a rigid academic timeline, but soon realised that rushing was incompatible with the depth of engagement needed to understand Bodo community and their land relations. Patience, humility, and flexibility became the channels for deep-dive into the Bodo life-worlds. It could be inferred here that these served not only as methodological requirements but also as values which were indispensable in carrying out the research.

My relational immersion took concrete form in daily life. I drew water from the well, walked to fields and homes, spoke the Bodo language, joined family and community events, sang songs, and participated in dance when appropriate. Early morning entry into homes created time and space for conversations and field accompaniment, while late evening participation afforded me insights about leisure and community events and festivals.

During my fieldwork, I also faced a moment of exclusion where one family refused entry to me into their home, saying outsiders were not allowed. This experience taught me about sacred and forbidden spaces and about the line between insider and outsider within the community. This incident was an important reminder to me that even an insider researcher must reckon with boundaries, trust, and differentiated belonging.

At another level, the fieldwork became a site of reconnection. Participation in a wedding ceremony provided an entry point into village life and helped build trust for the participatory mapping of the village. Group interviews and discussions held in homes, market places, and cultivation fields allowed me to enter deeply into everyday conversations and relationships around land. Sharing meals, walks, chores, and community labour further made it possible to learn from the community’s ways of organising reciprocity and collective life. The community well, shared for bathing by men, women, and children, stood as an example of an arrangement that I came to read as attentive to privacy in a context where privacy is otherwise limited.

These experiences also helped me to unshackle the dominating and biased narratives and stereotypes about the Bodos. The engaged immersion enabled me to lay bare the negative media reports about the Bodo villages as places reeking with ‘danger’, ‘violence’ and ‘the uncivilized’. These were contradicted by local narratives and that the movement of the Bodos was understood in the villages as a struggle for survival and a resistance against victimization. This stood out as one of the explicit interpretive findings about what village narratives revealed.

Working through time, space, and practice

The study’s participatory multi-sited design allowed land to be followed across social, cultural, political, and economic settings. My analysis revolved around broad thematic areas identified around Bodo worldview on land, gathered during the fieldwork through participatory mappings, interviews, engaged observation, group discussions, community consultations and sharing. The methodological design also indicated that I needed to examine political events, socio-cultural and religious events, and land-related development work. I came across the land rights assertions in a case study at Kumarsali Fwthar village, land allocation to a corporate house within Chirang district, socio-cultural and religious events such as marriage and Magw-domasi celebrations, and land development work such as road protection, irrigation, and high-tension electric pylons cutting across agricultural fields. These were the contexts through which the study attempted to understand the Bodos’ perception of land and the ways land is lived across different social, relational and temporal dimensions. The multi-sited design allowed me to move between leaders, cultivating families, and networks of relation in order to trace both change and continuity.

This criss-crossing between the temporal, spatial and relational was important because the study of land among the Bodos could not be confined to one village, one event, or one institutional setting. The fieldwork process itself suggested that land is negotiated through everyday practices, seasonal rhythms, religious and social gatherings, community labour, and encounters with policy and power. Therefore, the methodology employed was but an interpretive path into the structure of Bodo social life.

Knowledge and the ethics of representation of a community

A strong thread running throughout my methodological stance was the insistence that knowledge about the Bodos should not be produced against the terms of the community. I posit that formal institutions of knowledge have historically oppressed and suppressed tribal epistemologies, and that an alternative framework was necessary to capture the Bodos’ knowing concerning land, meaning, and practice. The community-first framework was particularly important here because it did not merely invite participation. It reordered authority. For instance, the community consultations and sharing were planned and carried out as egalitarian, collaborative, responsive, and emergent. I fathomed that the researcher should not be a detached person but a participant who was accountable to relationships.

Against being the detached researcher, I carried out the present research as an engaged researcher. A human person who has feelings, emotions and mental models for rationality and irrationality. This approach was consciously adopted throughout the research process. It was demonstrated by my adaptation to the pace of the community, in acknowledging the experience of exclusion, in the daily acts of participation, and in the renewed empathy and humility that the field required. If land is social, political, economic, cultural, and spiritual at the same time, then the research process must also be relational, contextual, and ethically grounded. In this way, the method mirrored the object of study.

Methodological challenges and reflexive discipline

I must admit though, that there yet abound methodological challenges in capturing the whole truth about the Bodos and their lands. However hard I tried, I acknowledge that my description of the colours, aroma, vibes and the vitality of the Bodo lifeworld, yet have several limitations. I realized that capturing the ‘vast unwritten’ into a reduced written form itself is a challenge of any research project. Additionally, I needed to make a departure from the rigid methods and tools previously learnt. I sought to address these limitations by employing the participatory multi-sited framework and through repeated adjustment of schedules to suit the flow of field information. Rather than weakening the study, I reckoned and framed these limitations as part of the work of indigenous tribal research process. I learnt that reflexivity is an integral part of the knowledge-making process itself. Initially it was rather difficult, but the wisdom and the ways of knowing of the community soon eclipsed my doubts and impatience. This reflexivity was illustrated by my willingness to revise pace, posture, and expectations contributing greatly to the research’s methodological seriousness.

Conclusion

This article, a revisit of my doctoral research’s methodological discussion, highlights the core insight that land among the Bodos cannot be understood in reductionist terms. It is at once physical and relational, material and symbolic, political and spiritual, and deeply tied to community life, memory, and survival. The study’s community-first land-centred framework and participatory multi-sited ethnographic design make it possible to approach this complexity without flattening or making it overtly boisterous.

My experience of returning to village life as learner rather than expert, the demands of patience and humility, and the emotional work of revisiting a history marked by experience of violence and struggle for survival, all contribute to the kind of knowledge produced here. In that sense, the study was not only about land among the Bodos as it also demonstrated how indigenous tribal research can remain accountable to relationships, community, ethics, and lived reality.

In sum, this methodological positioning underscored the importance of frameworks that privilege community voice and land-centred relationality. Such an approach is necessary not only for methodological integrity but for epistemic justice (Santos, 2014). Therefore, I believe that it is through this kind of scholarship that the meanings and practices of land among the Bodos can be approached in a way that respects both the community and the complexity of its world.

 

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Victor Narzary, PhD is Associate Professor, The Assam Royal Global University

 

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