Entangled Lives

This book considers three questions about understanding the past. How can we rethink human histories by including animals and plants? How can we overcome nationally territorialised narratives? And how can we balance academic history-writing and indigenous understandings of history? This is a tentative foray into the connections between these questions. The authors explore them for a large area that historians seldom choose as their unit of inquiry. The Eastern Himalayan Triangle" (elaborated further inthe abstract that follows) includes both uplands and lowlands and is the meeting point of three global biodiversity hotspots, and connects India and China across Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan. They treat the "Triangle" as a multispecies site in which human histories have always been utterly intertwined with plant and animal histories. The main objective is to foreground that history is co-created - it is always interspecies history - but that its contours are locally specific. The book presents a wealthof environmental specificities in which human history is embedded. The multispecies complexities encountered require the authors to recalibrate the conventions of academic history-writing and they do so by advancing new spatial and temporal imaginations - pushing beyond both methodological nationalism and traditional periodisation - and carefully considering local life-worlds and multispecies cosmologies"--