Queenbala Marak
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Queenbala Marak | |
|---|---|
| Born | Guwahati, Assam |
| Academic background | |
| Education | |
| Doctoral advisor | Tanka Bahadur Subba |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Anthropology |
| Sub-discipline | Prehistoric archaeology, Ethnoarchaeology, Material culture, Food studies |
| Institutions | |
Queenbala Marak is an Indian anthropologist, academic and author. She is a professor at the Department of Anthropology, North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya. Her areas of interest include prehistoric archaeology, ethnoarchaelogy, material culture, and food studies
Marak was born in Guwahati, Assam to a family of Garo people, a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group indigenous to Northeast India and known for being one of the few matrilineal societies in the world. Garos primarily reside in the Garo Hills region of Meghalaya, as well as Assam, Tripura, Nagaland, and northern districts of Bangladesh. Based on geography, Garos have numerous sub-groups with distinctive culture traits.
Marak and her siblings grew up surrounded predominately by Assamese-speaking caste groups. Few Garo families resided in the city, besides hers, scattered across different areas and localities. Her parents tried their best to instil the Garo identity in their children, teaching them to speak the language and planning frequent visits to the family's parental villages: one in Garo Hills, and other in Assam-Meghalaya border.[1]
Marak completed her secondary schooling in 1994 from St. Mary's Convent in Maligaon, Guwahati. She attended Cotton University, Guwahati for intermediate college, and graduated with an anthropology honours degree in 1997. She completed her postgraduate degree in anthropology from Gauhati University, Assam, and received her doctorate in anthropology from North-Eastern Hill University under the supervision of Tanka Bahadur Subba.[2]
For her PhD thesis entitled “Food, Identity and Difference: An Anthropological Study among the Garos,” Marak spent three years conducting field research amongst the Garos residing in marginal areas of Bangladesh–India border and used food consumption as a means to understand the underlying social relations of the Garo culture.[3][4] She received a contingency grant from Indian Council of Social Sciences Research (ICSSR)-North Eastern Regional Centre (NERC), Shillong for the printing and binding of her thesis.[4] In 2014, Cambridge Scholars published her thesis as a book, “Food Politics: Studying Food, Identity and Difference among the Garos,” which cultural anthropologist and former professor at Woxsen University Jack David Eller called “a welcome contribution to the growing field of the anthropology and materiality of food.”[5]
