Tribal World of the Eastern Himalaya and Indo-Burma Borderland

White Lotus. 2007. Reprint.. Trade paperback. Fine. No dust jacket as issued.. 466 p. Includes: illustrations, index, bibliography. . This is the first complete reprint of Edward Tuite Dalton s Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal in more than 130 years. The term Bengal in Dalton s time referred to what are now the Indian states of Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Tripura, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Megalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, and Nagaland, and the present-day country of Bangladesh. The new title is a more geographically precise description of the lands and people treated in this classic ethnography. Each tribe described by Dalton is portrayed in stunning lithographs that convey a sense of immediacy free of the staging common to Victorian ethnographic photography. The reader will discover a precious record of a tribal world now all but vanished. As languages and cultures disappear, books like Dalton s become sole reminders of our immensely rich human diversity. Jon Miceler, a conservationist who has worked among the tribes of Arunachal Pradesh for the last seven years, has written the introduction to this reprint. A companion volume by Miceler will follow which assesses the present day situation of the tribes of the Indo-Tibetan and Indo-Burma borderlands.