Contact : meenaxib [at] googlemail.com
Meenaxi Barktaki Ruscheweyh (PhD, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 2015) is currently a research fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she was supervised during her PhD by Prof. Willem Van Schendel. Since 2008, she has been working with Tangsa groups living in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India, initially as part of a VW-Foundation-funded DOBES documentation project team. Her interests lie in the relationship between the performance of ethnicity at festivals and the construction of a pan-Tangsa identity, as well as in questions of marginalization and of religious formalization of small ethnic groups. She has recently started working on the Moran-Motak groups of Upper Assam with Philippe Ramirez.
She has edited (jointly with Andrea Lauser) a special issue of Asian Ethnology entitled Performing Identity : Politics and Culture in Northeast India and Beyond (2013). She has also recently co-authored (jointly with Jean Michaud and Margaret Swain) the second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif (Rowman and Littlefield 2016). A monograph based on her PhD entitled Dancing to the State : Ethnic compulsions of the Tangsa in Assam is due to appear in 2017.
For her extensive bio-data, see here