¹ Doctoral fieldwork took place for 16 months in 1976–1978 and for a further three months in 1980. Subsequent brief visits have taken place in 1987, 1997, 2002, 2009, and 2011.

² Chakravarty-Kaul, Minoti (1998), ‘Transhumance and customary pastoral rights in Himachal Pradesh: claiming the high pastures for Gaddis’, Mountain Research & Development, 18, pp. 5–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saberwal, Vasant (1999), Pastoral politics: shepherds, bureaucrats, and conservation in the western Himalaya. Delhi: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar; Axelby, Richard (2007), ‘It takes two hands to clap’: how Gaddi shepherds in the Indian Himalayas negotiate access to grazing, Journal of Agrarian Change, 7, pp. 35–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Kapila, Kriti (2004), ‘Conjugating marriage: state legislation and Gaddi kinship’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 38, pp. 379–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kapila, Kriti (2008), ‘The measure of a tribe: the cultural politics of constitutional reclassification in North India’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14, pp. 117–134CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Parry, Jonathan (1979), Caste and kinship in Kangra. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 103, 120Google Scholar.

⁵ Kapila, ‘The measure of a tribe’, pp. 124, 126.

⁶ All names are pseudonyms.

⁷ I use the term tantra (and later mantra) in their ‘local’ sense, as proffered by my informants, rather than following the scholarly lineages of these concepts. See also note 45.

⁸ For instance, a friend from K recently told me that at college in the 1980s fellow students who knew of the village would sometimes ask him what it was like to grow up there, given its reputation.

⁹ Rereading my field-notes from 30 years ago, I was reminded how many conversations had taken place with outsiders about my choice of K as a place to live. Several people in neighbouring villages or the nearby town were clearly puzzled as to why I had selected K, given its somewhat unnerving reputation: some spoke euphemistically of the village's renowned ‘backwardness’ rather than being direct, though it was obvious what they had in mind.

¹⁰ Macfarlane, Alan (1981), ‘Death, disease and curing in a Himalayan village’, in von Furer Haimendorf, Christoph (ed.), Asian highland societies in anthropological perspective. Delhi: Sterling, pp. 79–129Google Scholar.

¹¹ There are echoes here in the Africanist literature on witchcraft, which I come to in the next section.

¹² See, for example, <http://indiaunheard.videovolunteers.org/mukesh/defenceless-woman-branded-witch/>, [Accessed 5 March 2013].

¹³ Government of India Planning Commission (2001), Report of the Steering Committee on Empowering the Scheduled Tribes. For the Tenth Five Year Plan (2002–2007). SI. No. 5/2001. New Delhi: Government of India, pp. 48, 65.

¹⁴ Two recent examples from national newspapers include: first, from the Deccan Herald (14 May 2012), headlined ‘Witchcraft claims lives of four women in Jharkhand’: <http://www.deccanherald.com/content/248943/witchcraft-claims-lives-four-women.html>; and, second, from the Hindustan Times (13 April 2012), headlined ‘Woman branded witch, tortured in Rajasthan’: <http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Jaipur/Woman-branded-witch-tortured-in-Rajasthan/Article1–840143.aspx>, (Both accessed 5 March 2013).

¹⁵ See Hindustan Times (19 November 2008), Education section, headlined ‘Lessons on witchcraft for Assam kids’: <http://www.hindustantimes.com/Lessons-on-witchcraft-for-Assam-kids/Article1–352734.aspx>, [Accessed 5 March 2013].

¹⁶ Bailey, Frederick (1997), A witch-hunt in an Indian village, or, the triumph of morality. Delhi: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Sundar, Nandini (2001), ‘Divining evil: the state and witchcraft in Bastar’, Gender, Technology & Development, 5, pp. 425–448CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Macdonald, Helen (2009), ‘Handled with discretion: shaping policing practices through witch accusations’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 43, pp. 285–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially p. 289.

¹⁹ Desai, Amit (2008), ‘Subaltern vegetarianism: witchcraft, embodiment and sociality in Central India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31, pp. 96–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Desai, Amit (2009), ‘Anti-“anti-witchcraft” and the Maoist insurgency in rural Maharashtra, India’, Dialectical Anthropology, 33, pp. 423–439CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skaria, Ajay (1997), ‘Women, witchcraft and gratuitous violence in colonial western India’, Past and Present, 155, pp. 109–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Sax, William (2009), God of justice: ritual healing and social justice in the central Himalayas. Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar; Nabokov, Isabelle (2000), ‘Deadly power: a funeral to counter sorcery in South India’, American Ethnologist, 27, pp. 147–168CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Desai, ‘Anti- “anti-witchcraft”’; Macdonald, ‘Handled with discretion’; Sundar, ‘Divining evil’.

²² Kapferer, Bruce (1997), The feast of the sorcerer: practices of consciousness and power. Chicago: University of Chicago PressGoogle Scholar.

²³ Nabokov, ‘Deadly power’, p. 162.

²⁴ See Rutherford, Blair (1999), ‘To find an African witch: anthropology, modernity, and witch-finding in north-west Zimbabwe’, Critique of Anthropology, 19, pp. 89–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John (1993), Modernity and its malcontents: ritual and power in postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago PressGoogle Scholar; Geschiere, Peter (1997), The modernity of witchcraft: politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia PressGoogle Scholar; Moore, Henrietta and Sanders, Todd (eds) (2001), Magical interpretations, material realities: modernity, witchcraft and the occult in postcolonial Africa. London: RoutledgeGoogle Scholar; Englund, Harri (2007), ‘Witchcraft and the limits of mass mediation in Malawi’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, pp. 295–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Geschiere, The modernity of witchcraft; Rowlands, Michael and Warnier, Jean-Pierre (1988), ‘Sorcery, power and the modern state in Cameroon’, Man, 23, pp. 118–132CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ For example, Rutherford, ‘To find an African witch’; also Green, Maia and Mesaki, Simeon (2005), ‘The birth of the “salon”: poverty, “modernization”, and dealing with witchcraft in southern Tanzania’, American Ethnologist, 32, pp. 371–388CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also relevant is Awah, Pascal Kum and Phillimore, Peter (2008), ‘Diabetes, medicine and modernity in Cameroon’, Africa, 78, pp. 475–495CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ For example, Parry, Caste and kinship in Kangra, p. 176.

²⁹ Marcus, George (1995), ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, pp. 95–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marcus, George (ed.) (1999), Ethnography through thick and thin. Princeton: Princeton University PressGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ This development had been anticipated by the Manchester tradition of anthropology, exemplified in an Indian context by Epstein: see Epstein, T. Scarlett (1962), Economic development and social change in south India. Manchester: Manchester University PressGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Harvey, David (1990), The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: BlackwellGoogle Scholar.

³² For example, Mines, Diane and Yazgi, Nicolas (eds) (2010), Village matters: relocating villages in the contemporary anthropology of India. Delhi: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar. Moreover, from elsewhere in South Asia, Stacy Pigg had earlier emphasized how, in Nepal, the rhetorical emphasis within government on ‘the village’ as the generic object of ‘development’ assured its continuing prominence as an analytic category, in a way that anthropologists too easily overlooked. Pigg, Stacy (1992), ‘Inventing social categories through place: social representations and development in Nepal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, pp. 491–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Candea, Matei (2007), ‘Arbitrary locations: in defence of the bounded field-site’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, pp. 167–184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴ Candea, ‘Arbitrary locations’, p. 180.

³⁵ Candea, ‘Arbitrary locations’, p. 180.

³⁶ Candea, ‘Arbitrary locations’, p. 175.

³⁷ Mines and Yazgi make a related point when they say that ‘the village is not a priori a bounded “whole” (although it may be made as such by villagers sometimes)’: Mines and Yazgi, Village matters, p.10.

³⁸ Candea, ‘Arbitrary locations’, p. 177.

³⁹ The outburst by the devta Ajiapal at the village jagra, which I mentioned in the second section, was, to say the least, unusual, a ritual voicing of a problem in a public and collective context where the entire village came together. But it was a general accusation, not one that was associated with a ritual economy for dealing with jadu suspicions.

⁴⁰ In making these remarks about K's layout I lay myself open to the charge of depicting the village in precisely the terms familiar from an earlier era in anthropology, to hark back to the previous section. Nevertheless, I am also conscious that studies of urban environments take as axiomatic that urban design and layout do indeed influence human sociability and consciousness: the transformation of cities is premised on such a conviction.

⁴¹ Parry, Caste and kinship in Kangra.

⁴² Kapila, ‘The measure of a tribe’.

⁴³ A point also made by Kapila, ‘The measure of a tribe’.

⁴⁴ Prasad, in discussing the way ethnographers have disguised village names with pseudonyms, speaks of the way that such ‘fictionalization’ has commonly emphasized the typicality of the village in question, giving it ‘the connotation, “any village whatsoever”’: see M. Madhava Prasad (2010), ‘The imagined village’, in Mines and Yazgi, Village matters, p. 257. As is evident, this paper is about a village that is emphatically not ‘any village whatsoever’.

⁴⁵ There is an ambiguity in my data on this point. While my informants in K itself in the past tended to say that the techniques of performing jadu were unknown, more recent discussions have usually made reference to learning mantras and, in some examples, linked the practice to tantra (mentioned earlier). Whether this difference reflects people's uncertainty and is thus guesswork or whether, alternatively, it reflects an unconscious quasi-sanskritizing instinct in the representation of such practices, I could not say. I am grateful to Helen Lambert for pointing out the ambiguity.

⁴⁶ See Gidwani, Vinay and Sivaramakrishnan, K. (2003), ‘Circular migration and rural cosmopolitanism in India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 37, pp. 339–367CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As they note, migration is a vital way through which people imagine their nation and their part in it, and it is ‘central to the production of modern citizens’ (p. 364).

⁴⁷ There may also be an unacknowledged reference in this context to the significance of education for girls, considering that a dain (‘witch’) is almost always imagined as female.

⁴⁸ Jeffrey, Craig, Jeffery, Patricia and Jeffery, Roger (2004), ‘“A useless thing!” or “nectar of the gods”? The cultural production of education and young men's struggles for respect in liberalizing North India’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94, pp. 961–981Google Scholar, p. 975; also Jeffrey, Craig, Jeffery, Roger and Jeffery, Patricia (2004), ‘Degrees without freedom: the impact of formal education on Dalit young men in North India’, Development and Change, 35, pp. 963–986CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ See Kapila, ‘Conjugating marriage’ for an analysis of the shift in ideals of conjugality among Gaddis in Kangra, which is associated with this wider change in educational aspiration.

⁵⁰ In Kangra, 74 per cent female literacy was recorded at the 2001 census, putting the district third out of 12 in a state, Himachal Pradesh, which had improved its performance to rank fourth overall in India; <http://himachal.nic.in/tour/census.htm>, [Accessed 5 March 2013).

⁵¹ The boy in question, Arjan, now works as a technician in Delhi. Visiting him in 2012 and meeting his two young children for the first time, I brought along photos of their father as a child. These stunned his daughter, who looked visibly shocked at this image of her father as a dishevelled youngster. ‘They don't realize all they have now,’ he said to me, laughing affectionately at her reaction. While I was there we phoned his brother, also a college graduate, who told me of his recent visit for work to one of the former Soviet Union republics.

⁵² Relevant here is discussion of the influence of ‘the somewhat paradoxical figure of the “rural cosmopolitan:”’: see Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Circular migration and rural cosmopolitanism’, p. 343.

⁵³ Ambiguities in the experience of time is central to Jeffrey's discussion of young men and class in Meerut: Jeffrey, Craig (2010), ‘Timepass: youth, class, and time among unemployed young men in India’, American Ethnologist, 37, pp. 465–481CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although his main emphasis is on young men resigned to ‘passing time’, he also refers to moments of panic and accelerated time and ‘feelings of temporal anxiety’ (pp. 466, 477), in parallel with the reactions I describe here.

⁵⁴ I say this even though I was doing fieldwork during the Emergency, with all the intrusiveness in personal lives that period entailed through the notorious male sterilization campaigns. Gaddi shepherds proved remarkably elusive to the government at that time.

⁵⁵ The advent of the mobile phone is another factor accentuating this gap between the generations. While the hillsides around K make good sites for the necessary masts (and have created a new source of work for a few as mast-caretaker), mobile phone ownership and use within the village still seems relatively restricted. It is no surprise that many more young men than young women have mobile phones. Among the latter, however, those educated to college level are almost invariably being given one. There may thus be opening up an interesting and—in the long run—potentially significant distinction between more and less educated young women: for the college girls are thus acquiring the opportunities for a personal life beyond close family scrutiny which is denied to their sisters who do not take studying to the post-school level.

⁵⁶ Kapila, in both ‘Conjugating marriage’ and ‘The measure of a tribe’, provides an insight into aspects of this same experience among Gaddis living elsewhere in Kangra.

⁵⁷ Starting fieldwork during the Emergency period, one attraction of K was precisely that it was not connected by road, for I had been told—and indeed had seen for myself—that government officials engaged in the sterilization campaign at the time were disinclined to bother with remoter places a jeep could not reach. That proved to be the case in the time remaining before the 1977 election, 700 feet of climbing from the road end being the disincentive people in K hoped it would be. My worry had been that if I was in a village easily accessible to any official calling in connection with the sterilization campaign in the early days of my fieldwork, before there had been time to cement familiarity and a measure of trustworthiness, my purpose and explanation for being there might be called in question.

⁵⁸ One of the reviewers for this journal questioned how confident I could be about the singular identity I claimed for K. Because of the localized nature of fieldwork, it would be foolish to overstate any claim for its uniqueness: all I can say is that local knowledge in the part of Kangra in question seemed invariably to accord K a special reputation.

⁵⁹ Kapila, ‘Conjugating marriage’.

⁶⁰ This was reinforced by such additional markers as language and a ‘traditional’ style of dress which was associated with their pastoralist livelihood.

⁶¹ Kapila, ‘The measure of a tribe’, p. 123. As she states, Scheduled Tribe status was granted in Chamba because Gaddis were administratively identified as migratory pastoralists; Kangra, on the other hand, was at that time part of Punjab (until absorbed within Himachal Pradesh in 1966) and in Punjab, the government at the time held that there were no ‘tribal’ groups.

⁶² Kapila, ‘The measure of a tribe’. p. 123.

⁶³ Kapila, ‘The measure of a tribe’. In a rapidly growing literature on the politics of recognition, see also Shah, Alpa (2007), ‘“Keeping the state away”: democracy, politics, and the state in India's Jharkhand’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, pp. 129–145CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ruparelia, Sanjay (2008), ‘How the politics of recognition enabled India's democratic exceptionalism’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 21, pp. 39–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bajpai, Rochana (2010), ‘Rhetoric as argument: social justice and affirmative action in India, 1990’, Modern Asian Studies, 44, pp. 675–708CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Middleton, C. Townsend (2011), ‘Across the interface of state ethnography: rethinking ethnology and its subjects in multicultural India’, American Ethnologist, 38, pp. 249–266CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁴ Gupta, Dipankar (2005), Learning to forget: the anti-memoirs of modernity. Delhi: Oxford University PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ Gupta, Learning to forget, p. 16.