UC San Diego

In the Nilgiris region in South India, attention to conservation and other land-related issues have been particularly pronounced in recent decades, notably with the rise of global environmentalist movements. In line with the proliferation of NGOs in India at large throughout recent years, the Nilgiris region contains numerous organizations operating over large semi-urban, rural, and forested areas, with diverse ethnic communities, and across the social and political spectrum at the local level. This thesis attends to this complex landscape through a focus on 1) the different types of aid projects and interventions in the region; 2) the knowledge practices, including the ethnographic and para-ethnographic methods that render these projects intelligible to organizations and stakeholders; and 3) the places, spaces, and subjects that are produced through these projects. The continued force of ethnographic knowledge of tribal/indigenous peoples, long held as objects of radical alterity, remains important to the work of NGOs in India, taking on a new methodological and ideological character while still framed by a long colonial and postcolonial history of enumeration, description, and designation. However, it is not enough to envision NGOs as the antecedents to colonial knowledge. The knowledge about indigenous/tribal communities, which tends to singularize and/or essentialize certain assumptions or cultural traits, also rests upon intimate relations between NGO workers and tribal communities. The second and third chapters expand upon the practices and consequences of forming stable knowledge assemblages while also recognizing the diverse multiplicity of intervention across the social and ecological landscapes of the Nilgiris.