Understanding Living Vulnerabilities of Santhal People in Nepal: An Ethnographic Observation
Keywords:
Santhal, community, adversity, livelihood, resilient,Abstract
This article is an account of life (hi)stories and lived experiences of the Santhal people at Gaurigunj Gaun of Jhapa, Nepal. This paper tries to respond to adversities and coping strategies for making livelihoods. Specifically, I have tried to explore the livelihood adversities of the Santhal people and what they have faced in their context of living. I also investigated the ways they have adjusted to cope with their current livelihood practices. The assessment of livelihood outcomeswasdone through the informal as well as formal interaction with the participants along with my direct observation in the research field sites.
The participants' lived experiences have been filled with remarkable Indigenous knowledge system having empirical traditional practices in the entire community. Having under a deteriorated situation, marginalized people like Santhal struggled to survive at Gaurigunj Gaun. For observation and experience, of all these facets of livelihood (hi)stories and lived experiences, I have used the worldview of interpretivism and criticism as the paradigmatic roadmap of this paper. Further, I took over ethnography, an observation of participation, which indeed contributed me as a researcher to present the self and other within a single ethnography which enabled me to focus on the characters and process of the ethnographic endeavor. Consequently, life (hi)stories and memoirs have been the pivotal methods for exploring the living resilience of the Santhal in the research area. Resilience theory has been used in order to gaze into the life (hi)stories of the Santhal. Throughout the practices of Indigenous empirical skills and knowledge, the Santhal people maintain their livelihood resilience.
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