highlanders
October 24, 2018 2:47 PM Subscribe
Can you recommend to me books, articles, videos, websites, and other resources about the peoples, ethnic groups, and tribes called "hill people" or "highlanders" around the world?
Like Scottish Highlanders, Montagnard / người Thượng, Горец, पहाडी (Pahari) and others. Things about ways of living, traditions, cross-cultural comparisons, transhumance, and more.
I'm familiar with James C. Scott's The Art Of Not Being Governed
Like Scottish Highlanders, Montagnard / người Thượng, Горец, पहाडी (Pahari) and others. Things about ways of living, traditions, cross-cultural comparisons, transhumance, and more.
I'm familiar with James C. Scott's The Art Of Not Being Governed
Response by poster: I'm looking for fact, not fiction, thank you.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:27 PM on October 24, 2018
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:27 PM on October 24, 2018
Best answer: I'm not sure if they count but during my undergraduate (a long time ago...) I did some work on the Garo, a Tibeto-Burman hill tribe who live in India & Bangladesh. The main anthropologist who did scholarship on them is Robbins Burling. A book of his I recall enjoying was the Strong Women of Modhupur.
posted by Ashwagandha at 3:56 PM on October 24, 2018
posted by Ashwagandha at 3:56 PM on October 24, 2018
Best answer: The Caucasus fit as well? There's the wonderfully titled Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoonboxes of Daghestan: Magic Medicine Symbols in Silk, Stone, Wood and Flesh which I enjoyed. There's also the more romantic but entertaining Sabres of Paradise by Lesley Blanch (it popped up on the Blue a while ago due to its connections with Frank Herbert's Dune).
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:18 PM on October 24, 2018
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:18 PM on October 24, 2018
The New York Highlanders.
or, The NY Highlanders
Not sure if this fits the request. It is a group of people who went by the name Highlanders. Primariky because they congregated on the highest point in NYC. Also a reference to the noted Birtish military group, The Gordan Highlanders. It is interesting that they used the term Highlanders or Hill Toppers in a city as large as NYC. When I hear the term Hill People, I immediately associate it with a friend from Kentucky who used to refer to some of the poorer people from his area as Hill People. Your link does refer to the US mountains.
It is posted in good faith. (Full disclosure: I am also a Yankees fan.)
posted by AugustWest at 4:41 PM on October 24, 2018
or, The NY Highlanders
Not sure if this fits the request. It is a group of people who went by the name Highlanders. Primariky because they congregated on the highest point in NYC. Also a reference to the noted Birtish military group, The Gordan Highlanders. It is interesting that they used the term Highlanders or Hill Toppers in a city as large as NYC. When I hear the term Hill People, I immediately associate it with a friend from Kentucky who used to refer to some of the poorer people from his area as Hill People. Your link does refer to the US mountains.
It is posted in good faith. (Full disclosure: I am also a Yankees fan.)
posted by AugustWest at 4:41 PM on October 24, 2018
Best answer: About the Hmong and medical communication then Fadiman's, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.
posted by jadepearl at 6:54 PM on October 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by jadepearl at 6:54 PM on October 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
Best answer: Kai Erikson's classic disaster sociology Everything in its Path is primarily a study of the Buffalo Creek Flood, but it also has to say a lot about Appalachian mountain hollow community and culture (and what happened when they were disrupted by the disaster and its aftermath).
posted by karayel at 7:18 PM on October 24, 2018
posted by karayel at 7:18 PM on October 24, 2018
Best answer: Judith Matloff’s The War is in the Mountains covers violent resistance of highlanders to plains-dwellers around the world. Each chapter focuses on a different geographic or ethnic group.
posted by migurski at 7:29 PM on October 24, 2018
posted by migurski at 7:29 PM on October 24, 2018
You might find the work around the idea of Zomia interesting.
posted by praemunire at 8:25 PM on October 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by praemunire at 8:25 PM on October 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Best answer: > cross-cultural comparisons
This is what would be really interesting: a study of hill/mountain peoples worldwide that distinguishes them from their lowland neighbors.
A book I remember that kind of touched on this is Apples On The Flood: The Southern Mountain Experience by Rodger Cunningham.
One of the points he makes in an early chapter is that there's evidence for an Ice Age European "west coast" culture, composed of the ice-free continental coast at a time when the rest was under glaciers, with busy sea trade and transportation. The Berbers of NW Africa, the Basques, and whoever was in the British Isles back then, would have been part of this. When the ice melted, a new movement of cultures came from the east, into the mainland of the continent, and pushed aside the older one when it got to the edges. The "peripheral" people of the Isles (who we call Irish and Scots) are descendants of that old marginal culture, overrun by the newcomers (Celts) (and it is true that the Indo-European Celtic languages of the British Isles are really divergent, not like the rest of I-E, not even like continental Celtic, weird in specific ways that make their grammars more like ... Berber. But that's not in the book; I just know that.).
The point he's making is that this "central" vs. "peripheral" distinction plays out again in Britain (Anglo-Saxons vs. Celts) and then again in America, where the settlers of the highlands (Appalachians) were "Scotch-Irish." So it's the same people (in some ancestral sense), and also the same patterns of cultural dominance and resistance.
Sorry this is so fuzzy. It's been a long time since I read that book.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 10:36 PM on October 24, 2018
This is what would be really interesting: a study of hill/mountain peoples worldwide that distinguishes them from their lowland neighbors.
A book I remember that kind of touched on this is Apples On The Flood: The Southern Mountain Experience by Rodger Cunningham.
One of the points he makes in an early chapter is that there's evidence for an Ice Age European "west coast" culture, composed of the ice-free continental coast at a time when the rest was under glaciers, with busy sea trade and transportation. The Berbers of NW Africa, the Basques, and whoever was in the British Isles back then, would have been part of this. When the ice melted, a new movement of cultures came from the east, into the mainland of the continent, and pushed aside the older one when it got to the edges. The "peripheral" people of the Isles (who we call Irish and Scots) are descendants of that old marginal culture, overrun by the newcomers (Celts) (and it is true that the Indo-European Celtic languages of the British Isles are really divergent, not like the rest of I-E, not even like continental Celtic, weird in specific ways that make their grammars more like ... Berber. But that's not in the book; I just know that.).
The point he's making is that this "central" vs. "peripheral" distinction plays out again in Britain (Anglo-Saxons vs. Celts) and then again in America, where the settlers of the highlands (Appalachians) were "Scotch-Irish." So it's the same people (in some ancestral sense), and also the same patterns of cultural dominance and resistance.
Sorry this is so fuzzy. It's been a long time since I read that book.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 10:36 PM on October 24, 2018
Best answer: If you change your search term to "mountain people" or "mountain communities" you'll find a lot. I recently worked on a museum show with art about mountains, and discovered a wide range of resources. The UN has International Mountain Day which is a campaign around many mountain community issues. Cultural Survival has a focus on mountain people. The Mountain Institute works on community issues. Follow these for more, and use the search term. There's a lot.
posted by Miko at 4:47 AM on October 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Miko at 4:47 AM on October 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
Montaillou: the promised land of error by Emmanuel Le Roy LaDurie
posted by ServSci at 6:15 AM on October 25, 2018
Montaillou examines the lives and beliefs of the villagers of Montaillou, a small village in the Pyrenees with only around 250 inhabitants, at the beginning of the fourteenth century. It is largely based on the Fournier Register, a set of records from the Inquisition which investigated and attempted to suppress the spread of Catharism in the Ariège from 1318 to 1325.
posted by ServSci at 6:15 AM on October 25, 2018
The people of the Tatra Mountains between Poland and Slovakia have their own dress and customs distinct from the lowland people.
posted by mermayd at 6:19 AM on October 25, 2018
posted by mermayd at 6:19 AM on October 25, 2018
Best answer: There's some interesting writing (you can track how it changes in the past 20 years or so) of the Ramapough Indians (see also Strangers on the Mountain) who live in some hills just outside of NYC. I'm not sure if they're called hill people, per se, but they fit the description.
posted by entropone at 6:37 AM on October 25, 2018
posted by entropone at 6:37 AM on October 25, 2018
Best answer: The famous early ethnographic documentary film Grass is a wonderful observational study of a high-country people, the Bakhtiari, migrating with their cattle.
posted by Glomar response at 10:48 AM on October 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Glomar response at 10:48 AM on October 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
There's quite a bit about African American mountain culture in "The Land Where The Blue Began" by Alan Lomax. Specifically, he makes two recording trips to meet and record Sid Hemphill, who was a famous fife & drum band leader in that part of Mississippi.
The book is not without it's issues, and I am unable to evaluate the validity of the through-lines Lomax claims he is discovering to West African culture, but he does have and convey a good sense of how and why the hill culture is different from the Delta culture of the overall region.
posted by OmieWise at 7:49 AM on October 30, 2018
The book is not without it's issues, and I am unable to evaluate the validity of the through-lines Lomax claims he is discovering to West African culture, but he does have and convey a good sense of how and why the hill culture is different from the Delta culture of the overall region.
posted by OmieWise at 7:49 AM on October 30, 2018
This thread is closed to new comments.
(It's not thaaaat trashy, she said as she ogled photos of Sam Heughan in a kilt.)
posted by basalganglia at 3:04 PM on October 24, 2018 [2 favorites]