A popular discursive that out-of-mainstream people think of themselves as the person of Adivasi, i.e. indicating it means they are inhabitants from the beginning of the earth. In this term, all fifty ethnic groups are Adivasi, but the government of Bangladesh denied this term. Adivasi is similar to Indigenous, Primitive or Tribal, but GoB formulated a Policy as “Small Ethnic Groups Cultural Institute Acts 2010.” So, they are a small ethnic group according to law and policy.
Published in Chapter:
Santals, Sal, and Forest Policy of Bangladesh: Reminiscence of Ethnographic Experience
Parimal Kumar Roy (Universiti Malaya, Malaysia),
Haris Abd Wahab (Universiti Malaya, Malaysia), Mashitah Binti Hamidi (Universiti Malaya, Malaysia), and Pias Kumar Das (EXIM Bank Limited, Bangladesh)
Copyright: © 2024
|Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/979-8-3693-1742-6.ch018
Abstract
This chapter reflects on the Ph.D. journey within the Santals of Bangladesh, followed by an ethnographic method at Birganj in Dinajpur, Bangladesh. The Government of Bangladesh formulated diverse forest policies, acts, and rules and either ratified or approved international treaties/documents to preserve, guide, and nurture the forests. However, when the author entered the remote Santals hamlet, they talked about their grief regarding the Sal Forest. Before starting the academic journey, the first author was born and developed in a village where the Indigenous research methodology was embedded informally in his mind as a consciousness part; moreover, as a student spent with Santals neighbours in the agri-field, school, colleges, and even the common playground in the countryside. As a result, it is decorated with field experiences and deals with the “capability approach” while the PhD candidate stayed in the research field for a long time and observed an intricate relationship between Santals and the international legal frameworks to ratify in Bangladesh.