Joane Marner

Living time and space among the first generation of settled Birhor hunter-gatherers in Jharkhand, India

Joane Marner is a fourth-year PhD candidate. Her research explores how time and space are lived by people who have recently stopped moving, and what this means for how we think about development, economy and social relations. It speaks to anthropological debates on time and space, immediate-return economies, hunter-gatherer studies, development and relational personhood.

She has carried out over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Jharkhand, India, with Birhor hunter-gatherers, the first generation to live in permanent settlements. The Indian state classifies them as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group, and they are widely seen and treated as people who live only for today, and therefore as ‘poor’, ‘backward’ and prone to heavy drinking. Development schemes promise that settlement brings a more secure future, yet little of what arrives is saved or invested. These views shape how Birhor are treated and how they come to understand what it means to be Birhor.

She takes this focus on the present seriously, not as a failure to adapt and plan but as a different way of living time: relational, non-linear and entangled with place and the spirit world. On this view, Birhor are not simply people at the margin of capitalism but people living an alternative economic reality. She argues that for Birhor, places, relations with spirits, and time are woven together, so giving up nomadism comes with changes for all of them.

Before her PhD, Joane studied Philosophy and Anthropology (BA) and Philosophy and Cultural Analysis (MA) at the University of Zurich, spending one year of her Master’s at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Supervisors: Fenella Cannell (LSE), Alpa Shah (Oxford)

Expertise

Anthropology of time and space; hunter-gatherers; immediate-return economies; sedentarisation; development; relational personhood; alcohol; childhood; Bonga (spirit) cosmology; Jharkhand and India