For those who want to get a sense of the history of Arunachal Pradesh or to understand how many cultures and religions and traditional groups of the land coexist, this book will make an excellent recommendation. The text is meticulous and deals with social and cultural symbolism well. The book will also be of great value to those interested in the crafts: photographs are resplendent with jewelry, artifacts, costumes and weaves from the region. Talking of artefacts, the mask making tradition of the people of Tibetan origin in Arunachal Pradesh has been extensively dealt with. There is also a separate section on the wealth of the tribes in Arunachal Pradesh like Danki, Maje, Merang and Beyop —metal objects—which have always held a special position among the different tribes and clans of the region. The book presents for the first time ever the artefacts collected from Arunachal Pradesh by Otto Ehrenfried Ehlers in the 1870s, stored at the Museum für Völkerkunde, Dresden. It also presents for the first time the objects from the collection of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (CUMMA), donated to the museum by the likes of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf and Ursula Graham Bower in the 1940s.
June 2014, volume 38, No 6